Ten years ago, that week in London began. On Saturday 2nd July, the enormous Live 8 concert was held in Hyde Park. On Wednesday 6th, the city learned that it had won the Games of the XXXth Olympiad and jumped for joy in Trafalgar Square. And on Thursday 7th, well, we remain thankful that nothing so ghastly has happened in the capital since.
Ten years ago I started a series of Olympics-based posts, leading up to the big decision day itself. We had no idea then how things would turn out, indeed at this point Paris was the hot favourite with London looking like a plucky also-ran. So I took the opportunity to write about my corner of East London and all the phenomenal things that were scheduled to happen to obscure run-down bits of the Lower Lea Valley if only the delegates agreed. I thought this was my last chance to highlight the recycling centre that could be a stadium and the derelict riverside that could be an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Amazingly no, it all came to pass, and I got to bore you silly for almost a decade reporting on the world-class transformation at the bottom of my road.
So I thought it was time for a retrospective, to see how much had utterly changed (for better or worse) and how much was somehow still there. I've been down to the Olympic Park with my camera and, oh hang on.
This photo can't be displayed. You might not have enough memory available. Close some programs or, if your hard disk is almost full, free some disk space and try again.
I've been having some memory problems on my laptop of late, and this is the latest manifestation. I can open up a single photo, but if I try to move to the next one in the folder it complains, indeed refuses. I can shut down my photo viewer and then open it again to view a different photo, but essentially only one at a time, which is a right pain when you've taken two hundred.
Low Disk Space
I've been having memory issues for some time, what with my laptop being a 2009 vintage model. My hard drive nearly filled up a couple of years ago, so I cleared out unnecessary files and wiped never-used programs and hived most of my enormous photo library off to an external hard drive. That held off gridlock for some time, as did trying not to save anything big onto my laptop, but computers are always attempting to download updates in the background and I found my memory being inexorably eaten away.
You are running very low on disk space on [name of drive]
Since 2013 my free space has fluctuated between about 500MB and 5GB, the former the approximate limit of unfettered operation, bouncing up and down on a daily basis as unseen processes play silly buggers with system files. It's not been ideal, indeed on occasions it's been damned awkward, but generally I've been able to cope with browsing, writing, editing and general faffing about.
Click here to see if you can free space on this drive.
When necessary, 'clicking here' to free some space has generally worked well, deleting unnecessary files that somehow piled up, and bringing the available free space up to workable levels. But over the last few weeks this hasn't been enough, with all the potential spare capacity already squeezed, and my available megabtyes pushed down to double figures. Not surprisingly this isn't conducive to efficient multi-tasking, and my ability to blog efficiently has been severely curtailed.
Your computer is low on memory
To restore memory for programs to work correctly, save your files and then close or restart all open programs.
Last week my browser became particularly unstable, barely able to survive half an hour before collapsing, and I was spending substantial time restoring and reloading sessions. I think I've managed to part-fix that - my browser now holds out for a few hours before collapsing unannounced - but this is hardly an ideal state of affairs.
We're sorry
Firefox had a problem and crashed. We'll try to restore your tabs and windows when it restarts.
Then there are the memory issues when my laptop restarts, as a window pops up to tell me that my 'paging file' is sub-optimal. And when I attempt to change the menu options, as it suggests, it refuses, for lack of space. Dammit.
Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a problem that occurred with your paging file configuration when you started your computer. The total paging file size for all disk drives may be somewhat larger than the size you specified.
I've not been stewarding my laptop optimally I know. And although I've attempted to make several cunning tweaks to settings on submenus of submenus, I'm reticent to go for any nuclear option for fear of making things worse. I've deleted about as much as I'm willing, and learned to cope with less than ideal operating conditions for months. But it is getting increasingly difficult to multi-task, hence the prospect of writing a meaningful Olympic post and manipulating a stack of QEOP photos has defeated me.
I really ought to buy myself a new laptop, because I could, and because a five and a half year-old machine is increasingly ancient. But I've been trying desperately to hold off until the ghastly Windows 8 is consigned to history, and finally we're nearly there, with only four weeks to go until the launch of Windows 10. I hope I can survive until then. Yes, I know Windows 10 will be a free downloadable upgrade, but my current bloated system is never going to cope with that. And no I am not buying a Mac, so sssh.
In the meantime I'm sure I can knock up an illustrated Olympic blogpost given a sufficiently long run-up, so please be patient. If London can create a global sporting village out of a decaying industrial estate, I'm sure I can write a few words and show you what it looks like.
