Gentle readers,
I must once again ask your forbearance for a small delay in the publication of Medical Monday. I began preparing for a weekend without my family as they departed on white water trip. I have had big plans for all the things that I could get done without them here, including some exhaustive computer maintenance that is been overdue.
I'm the sort of person who makes somewhat optimistic lists. Nonetheless, I was determined to get my computer maintenance done, as I was covetous of the increased speed it would hopefully confer. So I did the first thing that one should do when performing computer maintenance. I backed up. Yes, I back up to the cloud; I use iCloud since everything I do is part of the Apple universe. However I thought it prudent to back up the entire hard drive to another physical hard drive as well.
I have a habit of filling up rather large hard drives and so I should not have been surprised when my physical back up took all night Friday and half of the day on Saturday. From there I could go on to diagnostics.
Since I gotten a new larger terabyte hard drive I realized I to had re-create what is called an Edrive as a bootable entity on the main hard drive itself. This is because the computer cannot properly do diagnostics on itself unless it is booted off something else. So after creating the Edrive using my diagnostic software Tech Tool Pro I rebooted to the Edrive and set about doing diagnostics. I chose the whole suite of tests, thinking it would perhaps take four hours. I began the diagnostics Saturday afternoon and now I see very late on Sunday night that they are still working away.
And while right now I am OK with dictating you this quick note on my iPad, I will wait to do Medical Monday since, trust me, I personally have to have three big screens open to do the homework to write Medical Monday, checking sources and whatnot.
So let this be a lesson to all of you. Keep up on your computer maintenance. It's really not very hard, it really is not. Basically you obtain appropriate software for your operating system and version, and you follow the instructions. If you use the Macintosh operating system I can unreservedly recommend the TechTool pro software which you can buy at microtek.com. Since I don't use Windows I'm not familiar with the best choices but I know there are several easily obtained pieces of software and many choices out there even some of which are good and free available on the Internet. However, always read their documentation and read the reviews from independent sites before buying or installing. And by all means, back up your machine before doing anything. In fact, back up two different ways, once physically and once to the cloud.
Let's hope my diagnostics are done by tomorrow.
