Richard wrote:
All the BS can be depressing, but -

I had to reload Windows on my desk machine. (I hate when that happens!)

Which means 3 or 4 days of setting everything back up properly.
Which also (finally!) includes news group service.

So, while digging though 110 THOUSAND topics I learned that most of the
topics are dead as the dodo. Savagly killed and the bodies left as a
warning to anyone passing by.

So be thankful that this group, despite the noise to signal ratio that
you may not like, is alive.

That's something very special...


I started to backup my hard drive this morning to an external 1 TB
Seagate Free Agent drive. The backup program ran for about 30 seconds
and the system crashed. The hard drive died, and the external drive is
trashed, so I may have lost everything. Seagate doesn't recognize the
serial number as valid, even though that ST31000528AS drive is only a
couple months old. I pulled the drive and tried it in an external
housing on another computer. It ran a couple seconds and disappeared
from the list of drives. Seagate wants a report form their Seatools
program, but you can't get one if the drive isn't seen. I'm on a Dell
running Vista. I had to change newsreaders to access the group.

Seamonkey sucks, even though it is the successor to the older
Netscape software. This mess looks like it was written by someone how
had never used Usenet. I'm about ready to though the whole mess in the
driveway and drive over it, repeatedly. This is the first hard drive
I've had fail in over 12 years, and it had everything on it. The backup
files on other drives, USB sticks and CD-R are either too old or
unreadable. If I disappear, you'll know I finally gave up. I can't
afford a new system, and I'm tired of spending money to keep the old one
running. This may be goodbye to all the newsgroups I frequent.