"Oh My!"

The last week or so my computer has been acting .... 'hinky' (a legit computer term - I assure you). Every now and then it would start to boot, then wander off into some 'cyber-dreamland' or probably more like 'cyber-stupor' and just sit there - blank screen and all. I was patient ... thinking it might wake up - but it never did. I would have to turn it off and turn it back on again and then everything was fine - booted up - at full attention all 12.0GB of RAM raring to go and do wondrous, powerful things for me.

I decided yesterday, after it blanked out yet again (maybe making the 5th time all together) that I would call 'My Tech Team' - the REAL DELL TECH team. Based in the US - English as a first language and they are excellent. I had paid for the support because of the entire RAID1 / RAID0 debacle I got into with the support team based in another country that I still don't dare mention here (I monitor my blog and they are STILL logging on to see if I deleted the post I trash-talked about them in. I haven't.) I decided I might as well be using them.

Dialed the number, it rang and immediately I got a human - named Michelle who would be 'Happy to help me!'.

I explained the problem and she asked if she could get on my system and take a look around. I told her yes and let her on. At the time I was sitting with two folders up looking at some photo or another. She left them up, brought up the control panel - looked around a bit, then closed the control panel. She then right clicked on my C: drive and clicked on 'Properties'. And what she saw is what I saw and I have reproduced it here:


OK, MAYBE Gary was not doing a spectacular water skiing jump up in my continuous slide show in the upper right hand corner, and the news there on the same Google sidebar was probably a bit different, probably was 93 degrees outside, so basically this is what she saw on my one monitor.

Michelle: "Oh, I see the problem! Something is wrong with your C: drive. It is reporting that it is 97% full and that's just wrong. It is 2 Terabytes of data. Just a sec, let me look at something here ..."

Lori: "Um, Michelle ..."

Michelle: "Hmmmm, this is odd, the diagnostics are saying everything is fine ... just a sec ... I know what it is ...."

Lori: "Uh, Michelle ...."

Michelle: "Boy, I have never seen anything like this! Everything LOOKS fine, but something is just off - we just need to find it and straighten this out then we can move on to other reasons why your boot would stall."

Lori: "MICHELLE!"

Michelle: "OH! Sorry - I get so engrossed in a problem that I just wander away and everything else becomes a buzz in my ears. Yes?"

Lori: "Um, I think that the data used on the C drive is probably an accurate amount."

Michelle: "Excuse me?"

Lori: "The DATA. That gazillion terabytes? Yeah, I've used it up. I haven't been keeping track of it, but have been dumping stuff - mainly photos and graphics - on with no thought whatsoever about checking how much data I had left."

Michelle: "Didn't you just get this computer in January?"

Lori: Sigh ... "Yeah ..."

Michelle: "I still think that it is probably not this bad. You say that it is mostly in photos and graphics? Lets go take a look and see what is really there ..."

She starts the 'Properties' on my Pictures and ClipArt libraries. The "Size on Disk:" and "Contains:" start flashing ever increasing numbers ...

Lori: "Uh, that is going to take a while - the graphics one has to get up to 850GB and the photos has to get up to 600GB and it takes a good 2 or 3 minutes for that to come up with the total - trust me - I just backed each of them up two nights ago to their own 1TB drives and I know how much data I have - I just hadn't done the math and figured in all the system stuff along with it."

Michelle: "Are you sure you don't mean Megabytes?"

Lori: "Yeah ... I'm sure ..."

Michelle: "Your Clip Art library is up to 500 Gigabytes! What in the world?"

Lori: "OK, I know ... I am a data hog - I have never denied it. The numbers are correct. I have run out of space on my C: drive - it just sort of snuck up on me ..."

Michelle: "OH, MY!"

We decided that she would call me back next Tuesday - after my 6TB External drive comes that I can configure either as RAID1 or RAID0 - but since I have a feeling I will be needing all 6 TB's and not 3 TB's mirroring itself - we will be 6TB richer ...


... oh, in approximately 10 minutes - the UPS guy just delivered it to my door ...




... gotta go ...