HS:MS SOS 9

Today on HS:MS it's SOS.

A couple of months ago, my main laptop died and I hadn't backed up some of the pictures and scans I had on there (I know, I know ...).

Anyway, this afternoon John was getting some stuff ready for the council to come tomorrow and give an estimate to dispose of - we have quite a lot of old stuff in the garage and shed that really needs to go - and I thought that the dead laptop might as well join the rubbish.

Still disappointed that it had died on me and I had lost some family photos, I decided to have one more try to get it working. A couple of months ago I had tried everything - trying to get into the bios, pressing F2 or F8 or whatever, tried the restore disc, the windows xp disc - zilch!

So I thought I'd have one last try to resurrect it - did all the things I'd done before - nothing - tried about six times. Completely switched off again and thought I'd try again and .... you've guessed .... it came on and loaded up with windows and everything that was originally on there. Because I don't trust it, I then saved pictures and scans to an external hard drive.

What, you may well be asking by now, has this got to do with my SOS photo for today. Well, on there were some photos of my dad's last birthday on 29 October 2003 when he was 86 - sadly he died a month later.

The photo I've chosen isn't a good one (at the time my photos were taken with an early digital camera and the resolution was poor compared with what's available these days). But I've chosen the photo because it's one of the last that I took of dad with mum and even though he was in a nursing home suffering from dementia he enjoyed bits of his birthday, although five minutes later he had no idea what had happened.