a big, scary change...

Current work: revisions (yup, they landed perfectly on time)
Listening to: Pachelbel
Reading: Louise Allen, Married to a Stranger (still enjoying)

I’m making a very, very big change in my life today.

My PC is currently running on borrowed time. Apart from the fact that it’s running out of space on the hard drive, it’s become slow and creaky, and a couple of times recently it’s even refused to switch on. Scary. It means I could lose stuff. (Like the books I’m working on. Despite the fact that they’re all backed up to a memory stick and the iPad and, um, an external hard drive. Paranoid about backing up? Nope. It’s good practice. Though I admit that it usually takes losing something important before you start doing it properly.)

So I thought I’d do the sensible thing and plan its replacement rather than do what I’ve done the last two times, i.e. left it until it’s actually conked out on me, and had to rush off to my lovely tecchies in a panic, asking them to build me a new one and rescue my data from the old machine.
My very first word processor was one of the old Amstrads that came with tiny floppy disks and a dot-matrix printer (which we couldn’t actually afford, as we’d just bought our first house, but DH believed in that I was going to make it as a writer and said I needed a proper word processor. Top hero material, that man).

From that, I went to a computer which had to be booted up with a floppy disk – it was state-of-the-art at the time, but didn’t actually have a hard drive. And then, 20 years ago, I qualified as an ACIM (Associate of the Chartered Institute of Marketing), and the company I worked for gave me a bonus. I spent the lot on a PC with a 386 processor (which was state-of-the-art at the time), Windows, a hard drive, an external modem and Lotus Smartsuite. (Incidentally, I still haven’t found a calendar/organiser program anywhere near as good as Lotus Organize. I’m hoping that iCalendar, along with iCloud, will sort that for me.) I had a very early version of voice dictation software, too (all right, all right, so I’m a bit of a gadget fiend).

I’ve replaced PCs several times over the years, but today I’m switching to a completely different system. My PC is off to the Apple shop to have its data migrated over to an iMac. If all goes to plan, I’ll get them both back on Saturday (as well as a quick lesson so I can migrate my email subaccounts across, sort out iCloud and find out how Word 2011 works). They have promised me that my data, my photos and my music will all be intact and there is nothing to worry about.

Doing what I do for a living, I have an overactive imagination. So you know what I’m worrying about. That I’ll lose data/photos. (Um – I’ve spent ages backing them up to an external hard drive. So I can’t lose them, right?) That I’ll have spent a small fortune on a new machine that’s robust and have lots of storage – but which has a different system and I won’t get on with it. (Despite the fact that I have been lusting after one of these for a couple of years now and I’ve played with one in the Apple shop enough to know that I do like it!) And that all my routines are going to have to change. (Um - that one's true.)

It’s scary and exciting, all at the same time. I can manage without a computer for two days (I have the iPad so I can still say hello on FB and have email access, and if I’m really stuck I can borrow lovely daughter’s laptop). But I have a feeling I’m going to be a bit twitchy and difficult to live with, for the rest of this week. Except, of course, I have revisions to take my mind off things, and I guess I can always try to persuade DH that we need to practice the new step we learned last night...