To put it mildly, today was less than perfect. In every way. After getting up before the butt-crack of dawn yesterday morning, driving 400 miles, fighting traffic from Madison south to Rockford yesterday afternoon, and getting not nearly enough sleep to recuperate for the five hours I lay in the darkness not sleeping Saturday night into Sunday, I walked into my office this morning to behold the Blue Screen of Death on my monitor, instead of the usual black screen of a monitor gone into sleep mode. (I leave my office computer running most nights, as that allows it to download patches, updates from the university's networked antivirus program, and run system scans while I'm not around or trying to do more important things with it.)
Bear in mind, this was a brand new machine: my boss bought it for me just last November, and it had worked flawlessly since I unpacked it up until the moment I stepped out of my office on Thursday afternoon. I guessed, based on the sounds it was making when I opened my office door, that something had gone horribly wrong with the hard drive. I tried all the usual things: rebooting after waiting five minutes, sneaking in through the setup menus, etc. No help.
Then I spent the best part of an hour on the phone with (a) our IT guy and (b) Dell tech support (live from India, I'm sure). All they were really able to do was confirm what I already suspected: the hard drive had fried itself.
The good news is that 99% of my office files live on a network drive and were not affected by this crash. The bad news is that (a) my office computer doesn't work anymore; (b) I won't get a replacement hard drive until sometime on Wednesday morning; (c) I may or may not be able to recover data from the defective one; and that means that (d) some or all of the personal files on that computer, like final versions of papers I was tweaking in my lunch hours or outside of work, or things I work on as part of my university service but that aren't part of my regular job responsibilities, may have been lost. It also means that (e) I may have to spend most of the day on Wednesday reinstalling software that I'd already installed, trying to remember all the passwords to all the sites I had asked my password manager to remember for me, reconfiguring all my preferences, reinstalling all the freakin' Windows updates, and making sure they didn't try to "sweeten" the replacement hard drive by "giving" me an upgrade to Windows Vista. I specifically told the tech support guy that it had to be XP, because several of the government systems that I use to submit and work with research proposals to major federal funding agencies don't work or play well with Windows Vista. Put Vista on my office machine, and I can't do my job. It's just that simple. (That, or else I tell all the faculty members that I work with that they can't submit proposals to the National Institutes of Health or any other government agency that insists on having submissions and administration routed through Grants.gov. And that's just not happening.)
While I was away in the wilderness discovering that no, the hotel did not have internet access of any kind in the rooms (they did seem to have WiFi service in the lobby, but who in hell wants to check e-mail in a public space?), I also discovered that the transformer that keeps my laptop up and running was on the fritz, such that I only had a couple of hours' of battery life left. That problem was compounded when suddenly I needed to use my laptop to get work done at my office, since at least it had most of the software installed on it that I routinely use, and is set up the way I like.
So I wound up spending an hour at Best Buy. Not only was I looking for a new transformer (which I found, for $90 and change), but I was hoping to be able to buy some additional memory, as the processor is rapidly getting overwhelmed by the demands placed on it by manufacturers of bigger and more wasteful software applications, to the point that it takes a good five minutes after I turn it on before my computer is ready to respond to my commands, and sometimes the same length of time for it to shut down after I've told it to do so. That, I wasn't so lucky with. Not only is my laptop only capable of supporting 512 MB of RAM (or twice what it has in it now, which seemed like overkill when I bought this puppy four years or so ago)--nowhere near the 2 GB dual-channel I was hoping to put into it--but the store didn't have any of the right kinds of chips in stock.
Technology is a wonderful thing. When it works. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tumbler of Bushmills Black.
We had some pretty exciting storms while you were away. At least I think they were while you were away. Maybe that's what did in your hard drive?
Posted by: Andrea Rusin | Wednesday, 25 July 2007 at 10:42
No, I was in town for the storms early last week--and my computer came through those with flying colors and no problems. (I suspect having it plugged into a UPS unit with monster surge protectors had something to do with that.) It worked fine last Thursday, right up until I turned off the printer and shut down all my running programs just before walking out of the office. Then I come back the following Monday, and....nothing.
Still no sign of the techs with my new hard drive, either. And this working off my laptop is getting old, fast.
Posted by: Michael | Wednesday, 25 July 2007 at 13:51
I don't suppose you run Norton Anti-virus, do you? When I had that garbage installed on my laptop, it also took 5 minutes to load up. Switched to another AV and suddenly, my laptop is up and running in 40 seconds. Still slow, but better then the 5 minutes of earlier.
Posted by: Rook | Tuesday, 31 July 2007 at 19:17