Yes, We Cam

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My phone gets dropped into a bucket of water, together with my MP3 player. The I lose a memory stick and the laptop gets a virus. Cue familiar sinking feeling.

I get a new phone and a new memory stick and reinstall windows - which I've now got down to a painless half-hour process after lots of tinkering and practice.

I plug in my webcam and the network stops working. The network refuses to start working again no matter what I do, and then the webcam stops working. More familiar sinking feeling.

So I reinstall windows, set up the network, find it works perfectly...and try plugging in the webcam again. The network stops working, won't start again...and the webcam stops working too.

Right. So my network has suddenly become fatally allergic to my webcam. So I reinstall windows again, get the network working...and go out and buy a new webcam - which turns out to give a picture slightly worse than CCTV, but doesn't crash the network.

Oh hang on, yes it does.

It so happens that a friend has a super-duper digital camera which they've never used since buying it two years ago, so I ask to borrow it. After hunting down the drivers it works...but two years in a kitchen draw have left it without the ability to see yellow. So it sees everything in sharp, high resolution shades of purple.

Then I notice while checking something else that my system partition is formatted to FAT16. Now, FAT16 is "16 Bit File Allocation Table", and for the last twenty years has been used only on some plug-in memory devices. I have no idea how my C drive got formatted that way, and I wouldn't know how to do it again. But...some functions of networking and external devices like webcams don't work with it.

My C drive is now formatted to NTFS (and one day I might find out for sure what that stands for), the network's fine, my new phone is full of useless functions that I have to scroll through, the MP3 player is dead forever, the new memory stick is now permanently attached to my keyring...and I've got two deeply crap spare webcams.

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