It happens to the best of us (me) and it can strike at any time. We don’t know what causes it to happen (well perhaps someone, somewhere, knows the reason but they are not telling the rest of us) and the resolution is often drastic. I am, of course, talking about a windows fatal error. Windows won’t load, it crashes, it gets stuck in endless loops. You follow all the rescue tutorials, (printed out from work as you now have no access to t’internet at home) use all the rescue disks, (even the installation disk that claims it will either rescue the OS or overwrite any corrupt files) but still no joy. When this happens there is only one thing to do… reinstall. Well this, as you may have guessed, has just happened to me. XP went AWOL and so I had to bite the bullet and say goodbye to a hard drive crammed with… actually a lot of rubbish, which leads to this post.

Having started the process of getting the family PC back in working order there were one or two things that I had to do, or think about, which could help us all in our creative journeys. So hold on tight and let’s take a look.

• Rip it up and start again. Sometime what you have isn’t working, we shouldn’t be afraid to simply let it go and say ‘bye, bye’, however long we have been working on it. If it isn’t working, sometimes it needs to be thrown out.
• Reassess what you have. My PC was full of many programs that I really didn’t use. They had been loaded with the intention of using them ‘someday’. Although diversity is needed within creativity it can sometimes hinder. Too much choice is as damaging as too little. So, do you really need to ‘waste’ time deciding the medium for your creativity?
• Do you really need it. Similar to above but more of a ‘clear your head’ attitude here. I had backed up certain files and folders but not everything. A reinstall would mean that I would lose anything that wasn’t backed up. There were one or two things that I would need to work on again but… there was a lot of junk and clutter that was simply sitting there, gathering dust and clogging the creative cogs.
• If you need it, keep it safe. We all know we should back-up the important pieces of work we do, but how often and how well do we do it? If you are a writer do you have your work in hard and soft copy and in several locations should one be destroyed? If you are a painter where are your canvases kept, are they safe from fire, flood and theft? Of course, we are limited by our resources but we should be as careful as we can be, or afford to be.

Well, I am going back to reinstalling the software that I do need, speak soon.

PS Yes I know I could also do the following:

• Use a different OS
• Not change the file system from FAT 32 to NTFS without reading all the small print
• Stick to pencil and paper

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