Thursday, April 19, 2007

Computer Troubles Comlpleted?


First off, Happy birthday Jon!! My brother is almost old today. He turns 29. Yes, he's still younger than me, but hey, he's almost 30!
OK, I've posted before this week about my computer troubles. The photo is what my computer looked like at about 10:45 this morning. Well, I hope they've all been fixed, at least for the time being.
When I left off my tale Tuesday morning, I had no network card. Well, Tuesday when I made it in to work, the computer gods must have been smiling on me. My computer booted up, it saw the network card and life was good.
That is until about 4pm.
I decided I really should back up some important files onto my new 1GB memory stick.
The computer didn't like that idea and froze solid.
Sigh. I call the help desk to update my ticket and said that no, the deskside guy hadn't called me that day. I also didn't expect a fix as it was 4pm. I went home instead.
Yesterday I try and boot my computer. It's docked in the station and I hit the power button. It blinks at me.
Lights came on, lights went off.
Try again.
Same result for the next four tries.
Crap.
I undock the computer and amazingly it boots just fine. It even sees the network card and I can work! I get a call from deskside telling me he won't be in until today. I said it was OK since I could limp along as is, but I think we need to reload the computer and give it a memory wipe. He agreed.
This morning it doesn't boot in the dock (I'd put it there overnight). When I undock it, I get a nasty blue screen. Nothing too bad, but not like before where it automatically reboots. One of my friends had a blue screen this morning as well on his laptop that is the same age. Uh-oh. I call the helpdesk yet again to update the ticket (it is now just before 10.) About 10 or 20 minutes later my deskside guy shows up and we start working on the thing.
It took us until about 3:30 or 4:00 to get me back up and running. (But I'm still not connected to the dock, so I can't use my monitor, just the laptop screen.)
Everything went well at first. Then he tried to put it back in the dock.
No network card again.
*cry*
After a bit of poking and prodding, he comes to the conclusion that it must be the mother board. Oh boy, this is going to be fun. Both he and I are on vacation next week and I need my computer early the week after. I work on Plan B (borrow the sales demo) while he works on Plan A. Plan A involved moving my hard drive into a computer that's not being used right now, but has the same chipset. Both plans worked. At least so far. Tomorrow I'll be loading the demo back onto this machine and we'll see. I also haven't had the courage to dock it again. I'm not going to either until I get back from Canada and he can put in my new motherboard. I still have Plan B available to me if the demo install doesn't go well. I really hope it does though, the demo is much older and much heavier!
This is what my week has been like. A lot of frustration and a little bit of work. I didn't get anything accomplished that I needed to, but at least I have a working computer. It's amazing how hopeless we become in certain instances when our technology abandons us. I literally couldn't do anything today. I take that back, I could make two phone calls, because I got the phone numbers from coworkers. I couldn't respond to any email inquiries, update any travel plans or anything else remotely productive. I couldn't write any training materials or cobble together the custom stuff that I need to for a couple of people. Talk about frustrating.
Well, I've got a few more emails to answer and things to try and do before I leave tonight. Peace to all and may your technology not abandon you.

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