Living in the Cloud

My desktop has had some problems for awhile now.  I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong but it often blue screens. The other day Windows wouldn’t boot up. It powered up and went through the motherboards start up screen followed by the Windows logo and a failure to launch.

I’d been considering getting a new hard drive for awhile and took this as an excuse to do so. Solid state drives have come down a lot in price since I built this rig 3 years ago. So off to Fry’s I went and picked up a 250Gb SSD for $160, when before it would have been double that for half the storage space.

The only annoying thing was that all the drives are 2.5″ and my cases bays are standard 3.5″, But some adapters solved that and i began the process for rebuilding the system. Stuck the Windows disk in, loaded up Windows.

And that’s where it would have gotten annoying. But not anymore. Just a few downloads (Chrome, Office, Google Drive, Dropbox and Steam) and I’m up and running where I was before. Better in fact since my HD isn’t full of crap that’s been downloaded and forgotten about over the years.

While I have all my files backed up on a spare HD, most everything is online. I have instant music and picture access thanks to Google.  All my bookmarks are likewise saved with Chrome. All my regularly accessed files are saved on Dropbox or Drive so I had quick access to them.

Steam makes reinstalling games painless. Instead of a bunch of disks to insert and run set ups on, just download Steam, and then download whatever games I actually plan to play. It will take awhile to download some of these things, STO for example will be several Gigs.

The whole Cloud thing has already been useful in moving across my laptop, desktop and phone. I could work on my writing from my laptop but if, while sitting at the desktop, I had an idea, I could just pull it up without having to transfer files or go get the laptop. Now, resetting up a computer from scratch is faster than ever.

Which might be very advantageous. As I have no idea if this will fix my BSOD problem. We’ll find out.