A Little Downtime Drive's Me Nuts

The reason I haven’t been posting a lot lately is because I am suffering through an equipment changeover, and combined with doing things that take me away from my ‘puter, I hardly have time to do anything.

I have a 3 year old desktop that I really like, except it slows down at times, even stops, and has even forgotten how to do things. You know, like our Executive Branch?

So one day it wouldn’t boot. I usually take my wounded hardware to CompUSA but the one nearby went out of business. So I thought I’d try that place that sounds like Test Try, and their new service department that sounds like Beak Squab.

They have disk analyzer and fixer software and they said it would take 4 days. Six days later I got a call from them saying that the hard disk was OK but the memory was bad and they had to send it out to their service center. I said OK. Nine days later the service center said that the memory was OK but the hard disk was bad. They wanted to charge me $372 to fix it. These days you can BUY a whole new machine with that kind of money so I declined and asked them to send it back. Five days later I got a call that the PC had arrived at the store and I could come and pick it up.

I went and got it, took it to the car, and then went back in and bought a newer faster PC with twice the memory and twice the hard disk capacity as my old PC for $354.

I took both computers home, but before firing up the new one, I thought I’d try the old one, one more time. I had lots of files on it that I would otherwise lose forever.

It booted up just fine.

It was still slow, still forgetful, but it still worked.

Well H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

And what was this about a bad hard disk?

So I spent the next two days backing up all my files onto CD, and 39 CDs later I was ready to fire up the new ‘puter.

Plug and play. Best thing since sliced bread. Then the startup program had me register it on my ISP, and my ISP apparently gave it the wrong SMTP address because immediately after finishing with that I couldn’t connect to the internet anymore.

So here I am over at Ann’s place. Ann is cooking me dinner and is letting me use her internet connection.

But I can’t think of a single thing to write about so I thought I’d do a data dump on you.

By the way, a research firm called me today as I was working with my new PC. It was a customer satisfaction interview for the service provider that sounds like Beep Shod.

I let her know what I thought of those Geeks.