Thursday, July 1, 2010

Some Days You're The Windshield...

I'll give you 3 guesses what I've been this week. (Hint: It's not the windshield.)

It all started Tuesday morning. I was minding my own business, when all of a sudden my personal desktop computer shut itself off, and I smelled something burning. So I took it to the hospital, and the prognosis was grim. Seemed the power supply blew--and took the motherboard with it. Since I'm on a budget, I took the option of new power supply and new/used motherboard instead of a new computer. All the other pieces are still good. But they had to order the parts, so the 'pooter is still in the hospital.

But I still have the company computer to do my work on. Or do I? Mid-shift this morning, it quit talking to the internet. Since I work over the internet, this was not good.

I rebooted it twice, also rebooted the router and the DSL modem. I even tried switching the network cable to a different port in the router, in case the port had gone bad. I knew the router was fine, as was my internet connection, because I had the laptop running on wi-fi in another part of the house, and it was talking to the internet just fine.

I called tech support and they said it was very likely the network card inside the computer, as those have a habit of dying at the most inconvenient times. He suggested I try a "dongle," which is a USB ethernet adapter. I finally found the thing, right where I last left it. I even found the driver CD.

Next problem. The CD drive in the company computer could not read the driver CD. Back to the laptop, to download the drivers (which are fortunately still available) onto a thumb drive.

Now we're cooking. Or so I thought, until I experienced the first Blue Screen of Death I've seen in a very long time.

After yet another reboot, now Internet Exploder keeps freezing up on me. This too is bad, because the company software platform is IE-based. Makes it kind of hard to work....

So now I'm running every diagnostic trick I know to see if I can settle this thing down. And meanwhile, I had the tech support guys install the company software on my laptop, so I have that for a backup now.

I should have just rolled over and gone back to sleep when the alarm went off this morning, I am thinking.


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