TITAM - Technical issues that affected me

I was badly misled by online information on this one.  I don't know if that's because a lot of people have overhead service or not, but whatever. Per Enmax, in the Calgary (non-downtown) area, the cost to update underground service to 200A is about as follows: •  Transformer on your property:  $4,000 to $8,000 •  Transformer is 1 lot away:  $8,000 to $15,000 •  Transformer is 2 lots away:  $20,000 to $40,000 •  More than 2 lots away, or 2 lots away and across the road: $50,000 to $80,000 Most of this is the cost of underground horizontal drilling and Hydrovac, which obviously increase (steeply) by distance.  Given this I expect the costs would be similar throughout Western Canada. About the only "good" news is that because they drill, there is no surface disturbance to roads or neighboring property.  But that's not any kind of consolation given the massive cost. This is for a single detached home in the 'burbs.  Heavily urbanized or...

It's been a maxim in the backup industry for years that you can't image a live system. You always, always, always have to shut it down, boot from alternative media, and image that way.  Having spent more hours than I'd like on this, I can state this has always been true. Until now, apparently.  The Samsung Data Migration utility just imaged my live Windows 7 system, in all its glory, from a smaller M4 SSD to a larger 850 Pro SSD.  It took about 30 minutes.  It even kept the hidden system partition. Does nobody else realize what a godsend this is?  It's a working bare-metal restore solution for a live system. OK, yes, the Samsung utility only writes to Samsung SSDs.  (That's touted as a safety feature, as you're unlikely to have two Samsung SSDs in the same system, but we all know why that really is.) But, still - backup of a full image of my SSD on a live system?   Anytime I want to?  Really?   It's a god-damned miracle. In case...