Can I get a do-over, please?

I am requesting unanimous consent to move the calendar back to, I dunno, sometime on Saturday, at which point I'd like to reset the world.

I started this post last night, but was unable to finish it for reasons that will become clear later on. Yesterday was not a great day by any standard. It started off with a frustrating commute, got worse when one of my faculty members got up on his high horse because he misunderstood some information he wasn't even supposed to have, and continued downhill from there.

On the way home, fighting through another frustrating commute, I learned that Lois Maxwell, who was the actress who first played Moneypenny through 14 James Bond flicks, died over the weekend. I came home to find that the power had been off (not an uncommon occurrence where I live, but not usually a catastrophic situation). My TiVo was, I thought, resetting itself and would settle down in a few moments and let me unwind with an episode of Jeopardy! or something else from my saved selections.

That didn't happen. My TiVo was still trying to reset itself when I finally unplugged it at around 8:30 last night. When I plugged it back in this morning, same result. Chances are good that I'm going to have to get a new one.

But that was just the start of the electronic nightmare. As I was typing out this post last night, preparatory to venting a bit, surfing a bit, and then buckling down to work, the keyboard locked up on my laptop. So I restarted the machine...only to get a particularly nasty Blue Screen of Death, informing me that I'd suffered a registry file failure. I couldn't even get it to reboot in safe mode--it started the process, but eventually took me back to the same dire warning.

I was planning to get another laptop next month when our retroactive raises should arrive in our paychecks. I wasn't planning to have to do it on the fly, and neither was I planning on having to hope I might be able to resurrect all of my personal files, to say nothing of my research notes, documents, photos, etc. Prayers, good thoughts, well-wishes, and cash donations all gladly accepted!

Now, dear readers, if you'll excuse me, I want to go crawl back into bed, pull the covers over my head, and pretend that yesterday never happened.

Comments

[Bryan]

It sounds like you had a "Cat 5" power surge that took everything down. If that's true, expect a lot of things to begin failing in short order.

If your laptop was plugged in or connected via wire to anything and there was a major surge, it could take out a number of internal components, even if it was off.

[Michael]

Don't think it was a surge. The TiVo had been acting up for several days, and the laptop wasn't connected to anything except the network cable until I plugged it in and started it up Monday night. And it worked fine for half an hour before going belly-up on me.

I took your advice, though, and just ordered a ThinkPad T61. When I was just looking around pricing things, Dell had a promotional deal on that made their box at least a couple hundred bucks cheaper. But that deal apparently expired between then and now, so there wasn't that much of a price difference between the Inspiron that I was looking at and the ThinkPad. Given Michael Dell's Republican sympathies, I'm not terribly upset that I won't have to pay him another kilobuck.

[Bryan]

It sounds like a heat issue with the laptop. There are a number of component that work intermittently when they break, as long as they don't get hot.

You can probably pull things off by keeping the unit well ventilated and planning what you want to do before you turn it on. It will probably work for 20 minutes at a time until it gets hot.

Don't put it in the Fridge, you'll get condensation and really fry it, but if you could use it in front of an air conditioner vent that would help.

A big surge will generate transient voltages in telephone and network cables. This is what happens in close lightning strikes - they induce voltages in wires, even though they don't hit the wires.

[andante]

Oh, brother....you do have reason to go back to bed & cover your head.

I had 'heat related issues' with an ancient Compaq laptop. I reseated the heat sink with some thermal paste, which I don't recommend unless you have an overwhelming desire for some hands-on fix-it experience and feel okay with taking the entire contraption apart (and putting it back together with no parts left over!).

The laptop fired back up immediately, but died again after about two weeks. Fortunately, I got everything of value off the hard disk before that time.

Good luck....

[andante]

You might also try this -

Extracting data from a dead laptop with a laptop hard drive adapter

If the link doesn't work for you, let me know.

The procedure has saved me a lot of anguish several times.