Trois vieux amis

Odd sort of day. After breakfast I copied the contents of the hard drive of my wife's current laptop (a cast off from her mother) onto a solid state drive. I made a user error and had to do it twice in the end but that's another story.

I did a shopping run and the local Carrefour was missing all sorts of things, and not very busy but they had only a few tills in use, so they all had very long queues...

After lunch I completed the drive swap on the laptop. The basic principle is, set the new drive up first, copy data from old to now using a live disk (GParted in this case but others will work), go into the new disk and tell the system the new unique ID numbers for the new partitions you've created, and then install the boot sector. At that point you can swap the old drive out and put the new one in, if it's all behaving it will boot from the new drive and all will be well - which it was.

I use Linux, so this process is much simpler than say for Windows, which goes out of it's way - intentionally - to prevent you from doing this. Under Linux you can use automatic tools to clone from disk to disk, but if you know what you are doing it's almost easier to do it manually so you can tweak things in the copy process. For example in this case I got rid of an old Windows 7 partition entirely.

In the afternoon I watched a depressing documentary about Mad Cow disease in the UK, showing how clearly the government of the day was on the side of the meat industry and not the meat consumer, and though they followed the scientific advice when it suited them, they were happy to ignore it when it didn't - until it was too painful and there was no way round the issue - sounds familiar....?

My wife returned from her political campaigning and had a mostly good time, only a few fruit loops out and about today, Facebook has a lot to answer for, it and other social media platforms spread so much fake news and hatred....

Today's late blip are three old laptop hard disks. The fastest and smallest is one I took out of a second hand Dell, and was the first to be swapped for a SDD last year. The performance boost on that one was noticeable but not drastic. The slowest was the one I did a few weeks ago on my sister-in-law's old laptop that she had stopped using, that one was a profound speed-up, taking an old Windows Vista system from barely usable to a very nice modern Linux system. Finally the largest HDD of the three and middle in speed was from my wife's computer, and like the Dell's upgrade its faster but not drastically so.

I'm not sure what I'll do with these drives, they aren't too physically big so you can use them as external drives for backup purposes with a simple SATA-USB adaptor, but they aren't exactly super fast unless you have a USB3 computer (mine are all too old for that), and at home all my computers are hooked up over a network so it's faster to copy files that way! Anyway with the evening sun across them, the look a little bit interesting