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Today's |
The Blog
Monday November 13, 2006
I can honestly say that yesterday was my worst computer day of my life. It all started when I walked into my office and notice a reactivate windows message on the screen. That was little bit strange but hey, I filled it and it got accepted. But once everything was loaded I saw a screen that was definitely not my normal screen. I even saw icons in the systray that I hadn't seen in a very long time. It didn't take me long to realise that my computer had booted from my old hard drive. I added a bigger 2nd hard drive a year ago and that hard drive is my primary one. So I rebooted but the same thing happened. It had problems with finding my main hard drive. Played around in the BIOS I was able to point it to the main drive but I got error message after error message.
From listening to the 'Security Now' pod cast, which is a podcast I really recommend, I knew there was a tool out there than can help to repair hard drives as long there is no mechanical failure. I had been meaning to buy it to support that podcast but never did. 90 dollars is not necessarily cheap. But now I had a reason. So I bought it. Put it on a floppy and booted my PC from it. It did find a problem and after 45 minutes my whole hard drive was scanned. You can imagine that I was very pleased to see my normal screen again once I rebooted. My machine was a little quirky in the beginning but my machine had been turned on for 10 hours ever since without many problems. So when you have non-mechanical hard drive problems take a look at Spine Rite since that's the tool that fixed my problems. It works. I felt pretty good about myself. That was problem number 1.
In the afternoon I was working on my web site to fix some problems when I had to attend Mariska. I put my laptop down and once I got back the screen on my laptop had turned into blank and white. That couldn't be good. Rebooting didn't help. Did some surfing on my other computer (good thing the hard drive was working) and it didn't take me long to determine that this was probably a serious LCD problem. I attached an external monitor to my laptop and everything looked fine. So I called Dell and of course I ended up with somebody in India. Now I have to say that I didn't had to wait for a long time in the 'queue'. And the guy on the other end was polite and after several test he came to the same conclusion. Of course this did take 30 minutes.... So now I am waiting for some boxes to arrive so I can pack my laptop and send it to a service centre. So I will be laptop less for awhile. That will be a change since I use it a lot which is rather surprising since I swore for a long time that I wouldn't need a laptop. I now use it when I am downstairs so I can surf and still talk to my lady while she is watching TV :)
Of course there are still some problems with this website. Some have already been fixed today like the comments and the web stats graphics. I still need to fix some problems with the pictures site. A good thing I don't have to work today because of remembrance day. Today is the best day to be a banker :)
