A Little Cause and a Big Crash
The last weeks the clock in my computer went slower and slower – and sometimes stopped. The e-mails and files got the wrong dates, I kept on arranging the clock, but I had to realise: Already after one year the life cycle of the inbuilt battery seemed to have ceased.
Ten days ago I rung up the support of the computer company, the world’s biggest. After a long automatic intro on the phone I finally got a person from the support team. No problem, he said, we’ll send you a battery. And he explaned how to change it.
Two days later an express parcel brought a battery from England. When I tried to put it into the PC, I realised it was the wrong type. Again a call to the support team. Another supporter: No problem, we’ll send you a battery, it’s easy to change.
Last Tuesday I received a big parcel again from England – 20 batteries, but of the right type. Enough until the end of my or my computer’s life cycle, I thought.
I put in the battery (I had to take away the little board of the WLAN) and tried to restart the PC: Window started and crashed, started again and back to black.
With the help of the support team (in the meanwhile I found out how to short-cup the long automatic sermon on the phone, with pop-music in between), we saw from the bios check that the harddisk was still o.k.: You can try to do a soft recovery, this will keep your software on the PC intact.
I tried to to the soft recovery with the recovery DVD, but there was no choice, only: “This will delete all data on your PC”. Ooops.
Again a call to the support team: There seems to be no other way. Luckily I had done regular harddisk backups with a famous backup software, I thought, so I can restore everything.
The backup-restore software showed that the backup was fine, but the system didn’t activate the drive, though it showed up. I tried, tried, tried. No result. The famous software didn’t help in the case of emergency.(I later found out that the secure zone of the software might not start from an external drive, as it said on the web.)
Luckily I have done at least other regular backups of my own files plus the essential software on another harddisk, I thought. So I started the destructive recovery. It took some 4 hours. At the end, windows started. And I was happy. Too early. The software installation procedure went on and on and on. I let it go throughout the night. When I woke up at 3 am, I saw a message: There has been a problem with the installation, it could not be completed… I sighed, stopped the PC, and wanted to ring up the support as early as possible. When in the morning, after some restless sleep and a turbulent meditation, I started the computer, it came up well…
Now the work of reinstalling all the softwares was ahead. The graphic driver gave some problems, so again a call to the support team, and finally, with some new drivers, the screen was fine. Then the MS-office installation gave error messages. A long call to the Microsoft support, searching through the registries. It ended up in reinstalling the software again, and finally it worked. Many other softwares and data had to be restored, my head reeled in the end: The backup of the addresses of the mailing lists of my mewsletter hadn’t worked, I only found an old functioning backup.
So there is still a way ahead to control the many addresses and add all the missing ones from the last year, in order that the next Lunar Messenger newsletter can go out. I hope, without too much delay….
A lesson learned, I thought: A lesson in keeping my head and my nerves calm.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Oh My!! What a ride, my dear friend. I would say “Get a MAC” but I know that’s not easily done for someone who’s an avid PC user. It’s just that MACs make so much more sense… Quite a lesson in patience and calm !!