Document Soup has a bad aftertaste

Of course, one is always careful not to drop one’s laptop. Even if one has a clever Apple laptop that thinks “what is this sudden unpleasant sensation? Oh! I must be falling! And my hard-drive has important documents! They might be destroyed if the hard-drive heads hit the platters on impact! I know! I’ll put the heads some place where they can’t hurt anything! It’s like a seat belt, for documents!” the results of a drop could be disasterous. Not that I haven’t dropped my laptop a couple times. That’s not the point.

The point is that it can be equally disasterous drop things on one’s laptop. Of course, that’s generally not an issue, as one usually has a desk, and keeps one’s laptop on said desk. Heh. Unforunately, my laptop happened to be on the ground while I was unpacking things in my new apartment last night. It’s fortunate that my laptop was there to break the fall of my digital camera, when it came spilling out of the cuppard unexpectedly, in the wake of a bag I was pulling out. It’s just unfortunate that it was my laptop. Putting the key back on was relatively easy, but going back and trying to replace the data that was corrupted when the hard-drive heads smashed into the platters has been painful. Altogether, I only lost 40 or 50 files, but somehow they managed to pretty much all be important. About half were system files (most of which I was able to find spare copies of), another third were pictures (which I have backups of, in Bangkok and with Sagar), but what really hurts is that it hit some of my favorite apps. So I’ll live the next six weeks without Photoshop, OneNote, Word, Excel, or Counter-Strike, since I don’t have any disks with me (and unlike Thailand, India (go figure) cares about software licensing, and doesn’t smile on the pirated-software shops that were ubiquitous in Thailand). Fortunately, I can download most of the other things that were wiped out.

So the moral of the story is that NOT ONLY should one try to avoid dropping one’s computer, but one should also avoid dropping heavy things on a laptop. Anyhow, I’m back up and running.