Friday, May 15, 2009

A Bad Beat

My computer suddenly died today for no apparant reason. This is oh somewhere around the sixth computer I've owned in the last four years that's crashed. I do run about 20 different applications 24 hours a day without ever powering down unless absolutely necessary - this may be a contributing factor or I may just be extremely unlucky when it comes to computers.

I was looking at stats in Hold-Em Manager when I realized it wasn't showing about 1/3 of my hands. I couldn't figure out why so I restarted HEM. When it came back up I received some connection errors. I had received the same connection errors in the past and was able to fix them by rebooting so I didn't think much of it. Immediately after though I received a few other windows errors and then the blue screen of death. I tried repairing/restoring the computer, among other things, but I never was able to boot back into windows. At this point I receive a disk error when I bootup so I think it's safe to say it's toast.

I've been using Symantec's online backup over the past year to back up my data - they provide 40 GB of online storage for a small yearly fee. Unfortunately I hadn't specified which folders I wanted backed up in addition to their default folders. I found out tonight that their default folders do not include program files which contain Hold-Em Manager. So, I've lost all of my poker data for the year. I did make a backup of all my Poker Tracker data about 9 months ago so at least all is not lost.

It is my fault for not taking the time to see what Symantec was backing up, it's a lesson learned. It's going to be a costly one since I'm heavily reliant on stats when I play and won't have any on the players I'm playing. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe Stars can send me some or all of the hand histories, I'll find out about that.

This blog was more of a vent than anything else. I'll be spending the next two days installing software and trying to get my new computer up and running. Fun, fun

8 comments:

  1. You can get all of your hand histories from Stars.

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  2. That's a big relief, thank you.

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  3. GET A MAC BOOK!

    I have this 3-year-old macbook and no problem so far. Pokerstar has a software for mac.

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  4. I probably should have, I'm resistant to change.

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  5. get a macbook, and run windows on it.

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  6. George is right - I'd recommend you to download a free software called Boot Camp then get a license for using a windows xp or vista. So, you can start Mac or PC on the same laptop! All apple laptops' wireless capabilities are 100 times better than PCs and you could get a signal a few blocks away from you, ha.

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  7. Unfortunately, I already bought an HP the morning after my old one crashed but I will buy a Mac next time I'm computer shopping - based on past experience this will be in about 6 months.

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  8. You're fine - as Tony said, just shoot Support an email asking for all of your Hand Histories - they'll send you a bunch of links where you'll then download the zip files.

    Then you can import them into PT or whatever you're using.

    If you play tourneys (which isn't your focus, obviously) you still have to request the tournament summaries, which is a pain, but the important stuff - the HH's - are fine.

    OT

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