I downloaded a fresh copy of Acronis TrueImage Home 9.0 today and installed it on my ThinkPad. I’ll be imaging the ThinkPad hard drive to an external drive tonight. Over the next week I’ll be embarking on building a couple of computers. I used to enjoy doing that, but not anymore. I’m only doing it because I want to rebuild my two primary workstations – the one that went up in flames 3 years ago, and its replacement which cratered due to a dead drive controller on the mother board last summer.

Both have really nice cases, top-quality power supplies, and nice peripherals that still do what I need, so I didn’t want to just toss that stuff. Besides, my luck with branded PCs is no better. They go up in flames for me, too. I’m just death on computers, for reasons that completely escape me.

These two will be clones – identical motherboards, CPU chips, DIMMs, and system hard drives. That way when the first one dies I can just swap right over to the next and keep on working. In the meantime, the backup unit will serve as a file server and A/V workstation.

I really hope these are the last two computers I ever have to build. Maybe I’ll switch to Macintosh when the time comes to buy another one.