Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The Year Of The Dead Computer

It's been a busy one.

Shall I list everything that has gone wrong?

  • Network card on work desktop machine died.
  • Personal desktop machine died.
  • Laptop power supply temporarily died.
  • Router died.
  • CD-ROM drive on work desktop machine died.
And that all happened before last Saturday morning.

It all started when, silly me, I went to follow my boss's instructions and install PowerPoint on my work computer. It was then I discovered the CD drive was hosed.

No fear, said I, I'll just make the desktop machine's CD drive a shared drive, and install from there.

Easier said than done, when the target machine has suddenly decided to take 10 minutes to boot up, and then 5 minutes to open anything at all.

So I took a stab at a Windows repair installation. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

The machine did boot up just fine in safe mode--but half my software wouldn't work.

Off to Best Buy to pick up a USB CD-ROM drive, cross all the fingers and toes, and re-format the hard drive, and reinstall the operating system.

Finished all that at about 7 o'clock last night, and then called company tech support to see when they could install all the company software so I could, um, do my job. You know, the thing that generates the paycheck.

Their first offer was Wednesday afternoon. Fine, I said, if you want to 'splain to my boss. They punted, and gave me Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. my time. And then the tech was late calling, and then he postponed the appointment until noon.

After that, it took 3 hours to get everything up and running.

All things considered, this wasn't how I wanted to spend the last 4 days. But at least the final result was a whole lot cheaper than buying a whole new computer, which was tech support's first suggestion.

Ahh, machinery. Can't live without it, but can't live with it either, a lot of the time.


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