Faery, I got the PM. I don't see how to reply, so I'm posting here to let you know that I got it. I would think that the post office will be closed today, but I'll get the disc out tomorrow, either by mail or UPS. I'll post again to let you know which carrier will be delivering the disc.
For the entire hive:
If you have the luxury of having some forewarning before the OS hard drive dies, here is a better solution...
- 1] Buy an Acronis permanent license - $50 covers five computers (any combo of Win/Mac). Acronis allows you to make a backup of your OS hard drive - everything on C: is kept; your browser bookmarks, saved pictures, all of your software and their serial keys, drivers... all of it. Acronis saves this as a compressed file to an external hard drive.
- 2] Use Acronis to make a bootable rescue disc for your computer. Sometimes a CD is enough; or you may need to use multiple CDs or burn a DVD instead.
- 3] Verify that you have that holographic Windows key code sticker - copy that key to an index card in large enough print that you read it.
- 4] Buy a (bare, internal) hard drive of the same or larger capacity as your current OS hard drive. For OS drive, Western Digital's Black series is good.
With these four things sitting on your parts shelf, you can resurrect your computer. The advantage is that you aren't faced with having to re-install every program, etc., and you haven't lost your pictures and 3D projects.
Remove the old hard drive, install the new blank hard drive, power up, and run the bootable rescue and connect the external hard drive which has the Acronis backup.
The bootable rescue will offer to install the Acronis backup. Select
Yes, and it will re-install Windows (including key code), all of your programs, your saved Lolcat pictures, your browser bookmarks, your desktop background with shortcut icons all in place, your Poser-D/S projects, everything. Go have coffee while it's rebuilding - put some honey in that coffee.
The only things lost would be whatever you saved since the last Acronis backup. Your first backup will take a while; subsequent backups can be incremental - saving only that which has changed.
The five-machine Acronis license covers my four workstations and my laptop. I don't use Acronis for my render slave machines because for them all I'd need to do is re-install Windows (entering key code manually), and re-install the render engines (QueueManager for Firefly & Superfly, Lux, and Vue RenderCow), which is fairly trivial. All I need for them is the Win7Pro install flash drive and each machine's Win7Pro key code. I have the render engine installers on another flash drive.