I am starting to see the appeal of this whole concept of cloud computing.   On Saturday I bought a replacement PC.  The old one is one that I bought a couple of years ago when the motherboard of the previous computer blew up, and it was basically the cheapest base unit I could get in a hurry at the time.  Since then I have been doing more with photos which has shown up the limitations of its graphics and storage.

Anyway, it took me forever to get everything copied across to the new computer.  Being able to have the old and new computers running together, and connected through the LAN should have made it straightforward, but it still dragged on – all those gigabytes of photos and music to move, all those settings for three different browsers and e-mail, all those obscure applications to re-install.

I like to know that the applications I use are here under my desk and under my control and would feel uneasy relying on applications on the Internet and even less easy if all my files were on servers all over the world, but it wouldn’t half make migrating to a new computer easy!   I am seriously thinking about the halfway house measure of getting a networked 1TB hard drive and keeping everything on there so that in future I can just plug into that from a new PC.

It does not help that so much of the setting up now relies on an Internet connection whether it is to download patches or programs or just to register them after installation – or even just to look up help on what to do.   Yesterday I was planning to do the last bits of setting up, but in the afternoon somebody who probably got their driving licence from a cornflakes packet managed to take out broadband (and cable TV) for half of Broadfield by crashing a car into one of Virgin Media’s roadside boxes and completely flattening it.

Fair play to Virgin Media, they did have it all up and running by the next morning.  Their engineers were still out there working on restoring a service at two in the morning, but it was a bit personally frustrating.

Looking on the bright side…  in a fit of optimism I installed iHPtools on the new computer and it worked.  For some reason it would not work on the old XP machine but is fine under Vista, so now I can go back to using that to set up playlists on the trusty old iRiver.