What does not kill you makes you stronger!
I decided to upgrade my main computer system to support VR (Virtual Reality) in preparation for my birthday when I was anticipating a Virtual Reality headset.
All went well, large sums of money were exchanged to improve the graphics capability of my system. I installed it all and on my birthday, added in the VR headset, and started to have a play. All very impressive, but then disaster struck.
One of my “hobbies” is learning to fly, I have always wanted to give it a go, and I am now learning in a real plane when the weather is good, and when my very patient and brilliant instructor is available. Not being someone to let the problem of not having a plane be a set back I bought a flight simulator package (Xplane) which is excellent. This was the reason I bought the VR headset because then you are virtually sitting in a plane and everything is in the right place. But most importantly you can look around, and not use a “pointer”.
So this part is possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back. I will probably never know. To make the flying part as realistic as possible I have a flight yoke (control column) a set of levers to simulate the mixture, throttle and propeller pitch, and foot controls for the rudder and steering. These plug into several USB ports.
A whiff of smoke?
I tried XPlane VR for a while and after I figured out how to make it work, I decided to plug in the yoke, foot pedals and other gear. That went ok, I took off had a virtual fly around and it really is very realistic, the only thing missing is the chair moving in empathy with the aircraft movements. After around 20 minutes of this the computer crashed. No problem, restarted it. Did some more and the computer crashed again. After a further reset, and another 10 minutes, this time a pop, a whiff of smoke followed by blank screens and silence.
New motherboard and processor
My machine had failed in a critical way. I could not establish where and what had burned out. After some experimentation I established that the motherboard and possibly processor were dead. Even with a new power supply.
Fortunately the new hardware I had purchased was all ok and not damaged, that would have been very expensive. I had to get a new motherboard, and high end i7 processor, 16GB of DDR4 Ram to get my system up and running again. (£650!) But I ended up with a much faster computer. Then I was beset with a new list of problems.
Your Licence is invalid
My SSD system drive was intact, and when I started to put the new system back together with the old remaining good hardware I started to see messages. Four of them in my case:
- Adobe CS6 Creative Suite (£1000) licence invalid
- Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Licence invalid
- Ameotech Backupper Licence invalid
- Windows 10 Professional Licence invalid
What happened?
I last did major changes to my system in April of last year when I upgraded the operating system to Windows 10 Professional. At the time I reinstalled everything and all was well. This time the hard disk was not changed, but the motherboard was. At some point all of these applications have identified the hardware they were installed on and linked themselves to it. Which means you cannot just pull the disk out and put it into a new system which is the equivalent of what I had done by changing the processor and motherboard.
Where are your licences?
At this stage you have to relocate your licences. I know from visiting client sites in the past many of you have no idea where your licences are. My advice is before you have problem, make sure someone who is responsible for your IT knows where they are, otherwise it could get very expensive to resolve if you have to buy everything again in a panic.
If you do not know where your licences are, now would be a good time to find them, print them out and keep them somewhere other than on the computer.
All now resolved
Introducing Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer
I knew that Adobe had invalidated my £1000 licence, and despite trying to fight it, I am a little guy dealing with a monolithic organisation that is trying to convert everyone over to pay per month. There appears to be a lot of people in the same boat who object to paying for something twice, and at around £48 per month for everything, it adds up to £600 per year, every year for ever and ever. Not for me!
I discovered Serif Affinity last month by accident. Very reasonably priced software at £48 and very powerful. So far I have not found anything I was doing in Adobe Photoshop CS6 that I cannot do in Affinity Photo. So from now on all of my graphics work will be done using this and related packages. I now have a graphics and a photography package from Affinity, and there is a publisher coming out shortly, which I will get too. This is a much more cost effective replacement for the Adobe products I was using.
Office 365
As I was using a very old version of MS Office, and I know based on support calls that many of you are using Office 365, I have taken out an annual subscription for that.
Windows 10 Professional
Microsoft Windows 10 Professional was a little trickier, because everything else was sitting on top of it. I went online to follow their troubleshooting process and ended up in a loop. I went around it several times. I eventually found a path where I could talk to someone (not easy!). After a further 20 minutes on the phone with a helpful chap from India, it was all sorted out.
Throughout this, I lost around 3 days with all of these problems before I was back in the driving seat.
Disaster Recovery in action
Another thing to consider is how and where you store working files. I bought a small server which has 4 disks in it; in pairs with one disk in each pair being redundant. That means any single disk failure is recoverable. All of my working files are based on this system. While it was fortunate I did not lose the SSD system disk in my computer, I was not reliant on it.
All email is IMAP, and therefore the master copies are held on a mail server at the hosting company. I had backups running daily between my desktop and server as well.
So it looks like my disaster recovery/ prevention mechanisms worked for me this time.
Learning points
- Make sure your systems are backed up
- Make sure your backup system is backed up too
- Make sure you know where all of the licences are for the software you are reliant on.
- Make sure your copies are not just held on your computer system (single point of failure).
- If you are upgrading hardware, remember that it may be linked to your software, so do some research. If I had released the licences first then I may not have had so many problems. Of course you cannot do that with the type of failure I had.
- Bottom line is any form of upgrade is likely to create some problems, so do some research first, not when your system is in pieces around you.