crash.
|
Oh, man…
I’ve
had a couple of bad computer crashes in the last year, and it seems
like
they’ve gotten worse. The first one was
a good old fashioned hard-drive failure.
I accidentally left my machine on overnight, and when I
checked on it
the next morning the drive was making that sickening clicking sound
that
announces “hope you backed up your data recently.” It
was time for a new machine anyway, so I
went out and bought a new desktop, which came with The
more recent and painful crash was my laptop.
One day out of the blue it started misbehaving, and then
gave me some
obscure registry errors and ultimately a blue screen of death. It was able to reboot once or twice, with
similar strangeness, but then it got so screwed up that it wouldn’t
boot at all
and every attempt ended in some variation on a blue screen. From the BIOS I was able to run a disk check
to confirm that the hard drive was still good; as far as I can tell,
this was
just a software issue (albeit one that completely lobotomized the
machine). After
multiple calls to my brother the computer engineer, I was able to boot
the
machine from a linux live cd and pull off the files I needed via a USB
stick. Some small miracle, that. I
still have all the original documentation and CDs that came with the
machine,
which include recovery CDs for the OS and supposedly all the
applications. So, I went ahead and tried
to re-install the
OS. This required reformatting the drive
(a.k.a. the point of no return), which took a while but appeared to be
successful. However, when I tried to
reinstall Windows from the recovery CD, there were about 40 files that
the
machine claimed it couldn’t find on the CD that prevented it from
installing
correctly. I tried multiple times, and
each time the same 40 some files came up missing. It’s
an HP machine, so I actually tried calling their tech support, which of
course
is in At
this point, I didn’t know what to do. I
suspected it might have something to do with all the extra media
features on
this particular machine (although I never used them, this machine has
dedicated
buttons to let it serve as a DVD/CD player without having to boot the
computer). The machine is barely three
years old, and I liked it a lot. I never
had any trouble until this, and I was expecting to get a couple more
years out
of it. Finally,
I broke down and took the machine in to Best Buy, where I paid out the
nose to
have the problem traced to a RAM stick that I had bought a few months
before so
that I could load the latest and greatest version of my anti-virus
software. Apparently, sometimes RAM just
fails. Once I swapped out the failed
RAM, everything was fine and I was able get the machine running again,
and all
the software reinstalled. So,
problem solved. And three weekends lost. |