Murphy get’s even
Things had been running so smoothly around here lately that I was actually beginning to think that when I do decide it’s time to leave, (probably next year, I get fully vested in the pension at the end of this year) it probably won’t be too big a deal. Then yesterday afternoon happened, and I was proven wrong. First we had a machine that needed to be rebooted because of some memory issues. Upon reboot the user got an “imminent hard drive failure” message. Sure enough she’s got the combination Compaq Deskpro with Fujitsu drive that has died on 5-6 other machines in the nearly two years that we’ve had them. I was able to get her restarted right after lunch (How? I have no idea!), knowing that I’d better call Compaq and order the replacement drive because it was probably only a matter of days. It turned out to be a matter of two hours. Blue screen and a memory dump, restart, works for a few minutes, blue screen and memory dump again. OK, we’ll just have her use an older Win98 machine that I’ve got laying around until the new drive gets here and I can replace it. I go and check on that machine, yeah everything on it works, no problem. Unplug it and haul it up to her office, it won’t start. Try again, it freezes during bootup. Try starting in Safe Mode, that works and everything seems ok on the diagnostics, restart, freezes again. Try a step-by-step confirmation startup, freezes looking for a vxd, I think it was. (I didn’t write it down that’s just what I seem to recall a day later. *L*) So I spend about an hour using a 98 bootdisk and the 98 CD repairing the Windows installation, knowing full well that this is probably going to cause other software not to work and I’m going to be here into the evening reinstalling software, right? Well, actually no, installing the Windows files over top of the existing Windows directory solved the boot problem and didn’t appear to break anything. Again, I have no idea why it didn’t, I was fully expecting it to. But I’m not complaining.
Hopefully the drive will arrive today so I can get it fixed before she finds something is broken on the 98 machine. 🙂
Some interesting ideas in the comments this morning, Gary, don’t worry I can configure the feed to be the whole post, I was thinking of doing that anyway once it goes into production, because I’m not completely hung up on traffic numbers. 🙂 Keep using the old feed for now, but when I dismiss that one I’ll be sure to configure this one to be the whole feed. I like it because it uses the titles, the old one used the first 25 or something characters of the post as the title, which is confusing.
Paul, you’re right, having all of the discussions take place in the forums and not in the comments would speed up the page loading, but I’m not sure that enough people would trek over there to actually get a conversation going. I’m having a hard enough time keeping flow to the forums with discussions that aren’t part of the regular blog. Making blog discussions go over there would just make it harder for people to leave a quick comment like they can here. I don’t want to make things harder for you guys.
Did you know Network Computing has a blog? I didn’t until I saw a reference to it at nf0’s place this morning.
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