While I'd hesitate to draw too many moral lessons from computer related nightmares, the problem I have been having for the last fourteen hours results from procrastination. (Which might be a moral lesson, of sorts.) And sheer clutter. My main hard drive filled to over 90% capacity, and it was slowing everything down. I knew I didn't need a new computer (even though a strangulating-to-the-point-of-cyber-gangrene hard drive will make an OS unbearably slow), but I knew I needed a new hard drive badly, so I got one.

(These days, size matters!)

Assuming it would be a snap with the slick software ("copy drive to drive!" it says), I booted up the poor thing with both hard drives connected, following all instructions to the letter. My hope was that I could transfer everything -- including the OS -- in one fell swoop, but these hopes were dashed by a sudden error message stating that the transfer had been aborted because of file errors, and it was "recommended" that I go back and defrag the old hard drive.

Defragging a 120 gigabyte drive with only 7 gigabytes free is a challenging and time-consuming (if not impossible) task, but I thought, what the hell, I'll just get some sleep and wake up tomorrow morning and do what I had intended to do. Wishful thinking on my part. Upon rebooting with my old drive, the OS refused to start. Instead it went into an endless reboot cycle, from the Windows startup screen back to the BIOS ad infinitum. Assuming I'd wiped the master boot record, I restored it. No effect. The OS was irreparably damaged by the software that was supposed to merely move it. So, I ended up having to reinstall a new OS on the new 300 Gigabyte drive. This was complicated by the dreaded 137 Gigabyte barrier, and an older anti-growth motherboard. I had to format the new drive for 137 Gigs, thus conning the Luddite board and my old Windows XP CD into accepting the install. After four failed installation attempts, it finally booted! Then I had to go through over 40 lengthy Windows Critical File Updates, then update the XP Service Packs (this all took hours), and only then could I install another piece of software instructing XP's registry to see the rest of the drive.

Now I'm having to laboriously, manually, go through the old drive to "migrate" the files, folders, settings, and software one at a time. Some of my software goes back to Windows 98, and the old drive ran on Windows 2000, so there are a lot of "issues," and I know this must be as tedious to read as it is to write!

But that's why I'm slowed down a bit. Hard drives have a way of affecting the ability to blog.

Procrastination sucks.

(That's why I always try to postpone it.)