Luddite pt.6

It's been a while since one of these.

I finally plucked up the courage to install Windows Service Pack 2. Yes, stop laughing in the back there, I know it's been out forever. But there were scary stories about what happened to some people's systems and my computer seemed to be running perfectly well without it for the most part.

I nervously backed up all the bits of personal data I could think of onto a CD. Only I missed something, because I didn't expect it to be relevant.

SP2 itself seems to have worked perfectly. My computer is behaving just as it did, except for the added bonus that the one program that wouldn't work - the game Myst IV: Revelation - miraculously started working after a couple of months of fruitless back and forth between myself and technical support on the other side of the world. I have sent them a somewhat curt e-mail to say 'thanks for nothing'. Dammit, I asked them whether SP2 might help!

The sting in the tail, though, was that SP2 comes 'bundled' with Windows Media Player 9.

I hate WMP 9. I already tried it, and greatly prefer WMP 8. But with the Service Pack, I can't go back. I've gone forward to WMP 10 instead, which is a marked improvement on 9 but still more fiddly than it needs to be.

The killer thing about WMP 9 though, the thing I truly hated, was that it couldn't keep track of playlists properly. It's lost them. If I'd gone straight from 8 to 10, I seem to recall from past dabbling that many of them would have survived, but now I won't have the chance to find out.

Of the really crucial playlists, the ones I slaved over, I can get two of them back because I used them to make CDs for friends. But what I can't get back is the 3-CD best of Tori Amos' Atlantic Years that I had constructed and was close to giving the official 'okay, let's burn it' seal of approval after trying out the track listing repeatedly over the space of at least 6 months.

I have spent the last couple of days playing detective, only to confirm that my written notes don't have the final version.

I could scream. Really.

It took me at least an hour to positively identify all 51 tracks (17 per disc), let alone where they belonged. I think I've succeeded in at least identifying which disc each song belongs on.

Of the 3 discs, I'm 99% confident that I have accurately reconstructed CD3. CD2 is in fair shape, with the first half almost certainly correct and probably only a set of five songs in the second half to re-arrange. CD1, the one that I altered the most from the first draft I have on paper, is quite a mess, especially the second half.

All because I trusted a damn computer program to remember something for me.