God saves all of me ... sometimes even my tail feathers.

Thank You Lord for being so gracious with my hard-headedness.

I first started TEN3 a few months after I graduated college. I was using the laptop I'd acquired, thanks to a gift from my thoughtful great-uncle, before college, so it had some age on it already. Pretty soon after SIM helped me set it all up with encryption, missionary support software, and a password safe, my 5-year-old hard drive died. So I bought a new laptop, and well, that was six years ago now. But it was running pretty well ... except, the network would drop once in a while, and it would freeze up when screen sharing or mounting a huge filesystem.

"You need a new laptop. It's not going to last much longer," my husband told me.

"It's fine, I can live with it," I protested.

That as we're admonishing schools to be replacing one laptop per month because they will break down.

I was provided a refurbished laptop, specified for my work use rather than to be sent to Africa, a few weeks ago. I was grateful for it ... but I just let it sit there. My old laptop was working okay, at least, dealing with its glitches would still be less effort than getting the right programs and settings done on the new one. I'll get to it, once things settle down.

Well, things didn't settle down, and yesterday in the middle of work, it lost its network capability again. Resetting the network didn't help, redoing the ipconfig didn't help, restarting didn't help. Okay, maybe it is time to break out that new laptop. So I began a backup to make sure all my files were up-to-date so I could transfer them over. It froze the computer overnight. In the morning, fortunately, the backup was successfully completed, but any command I would give the computer would freeze it for at least five minutes. So it looks like if I had delayed any longer, I may have lost a few projects I'd put a lot of time into since my last backup.

I'm not quite sure why I have that tendency to push some common-sense limits, but until I figure it out, I thank God for taking care of my needs on this one ahead of time so the only unnecessary stress I've had is going a day dealing with an unconfigured system. How DO you people manage with only one desktop, anyway?