March 7, 2004
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Escallation
Last week was a bad week. The problems have grown since their beginning.
For some time now, Cathy has been complaining that her computer didn't work. It would reset itself after just a few minutes of operation. Her virus definitions were up-to-date, so I finally took a look at it. A quick test indicated that the battery that keeps her ROM BIOS alive had died. I asked her to clean off enough space for me to move the monitor and disassemble the computer.
It took her over a week to clean up enough space for me to work.
I made sure which kind of battery the machine uses, then went off to get a new one at a cost of just $3. The machine hadn't been disassembled for several years, so disassembly required a bit of force. When taken apart, large amounts of dirt poured out of the box. Therefore, I wasn't terribly surprised when replacing the battery and reassembling the box didn't fix anything.
The computer was now completely dead.
I took it apart several times more, a task that was now simple, but could find no obvious signs of damage. So I took it back to the people who had built it for me. Of course the machine would require special proprietary parts they might not be able to get promptly, they said. I gave up on the idea of repairs.
They had a much smaller selection of cases than they used to stock, and the quality was disappointing. Only one box was of decent quality. It was also small and expensive. Given the choice between a good little box and a big piece of crap, I naturally chose the little, quality box.
The new box had its own motherboard. I had to add memory (512 megabytes) and a processor (2.4 gigahertz P4). I also decided to add a DVD+/-R+/-RW drive. The hard drive and floppy could come from the old machine.
They could have, but Cathy had the hard drive full of crap. She wanted to keep it all. The new drive would need some new software, and it had no place to go. I added a new hard drive, having the stuff from the old hard drive copied over.
When I got the new machine home, three things didn't work: sound, the printer and ... the high-speed connection to the Internet.
I got the sound working. Cathy says she always got the bad printer indication on the old machine and that it goes away as soon as you try to print something.
I couldn't get the computer to see the Internet, so I decided to run some tests on my machine downstairs, to see if I could figure out how to fix the problem. I managed to duplicate the problem on the other computer, but I couldn't make it go away.
Now both computers were unable to talk to the Internet.
I'm asking Cathy to back up her programs and software to DVD+RW. We may have to upgrade her operating system. I'll take her machine back to the people who built it tomorrow to see if they can find out how to make it talk to the Internet. If that fails, I'll buy a copy of the upgrade package and install it when I get home.
Meanwhile, I've had to press a backup computer into service for my use downstairs. I can probably never go back to the system I was using. It took me all day yesterday to get the backup computer set up as my primary computer, connected and talking to the Internet. Well, I was also doing laundry, but that doesn't really count.
Anyway, after several days, I was finally able to read email again. I have to train the new email program to recognize Spam, but that is a fairly quick process.
I didn't have my telephone working again until this morning. It had been integrated into the old primary computer. When I started using the high-speed link, I never removed the modem or phone connection. I had to do that yesterday, hooking things up wrong in the process. I don't use the phone that much and didn't notice that there was a problem until Delia got home and tried to contact me.
She had to come downstairs last night to tell me the phone wasn't working. I figured out right away that it wasn't plugged in. This morning I finally figured out that I had been connected to the wrong phone circuit.
And I have screwed up one of my two bridge units, the devices that give me wireless connection to the router upstairs. When I typed in the access password incorrectly, the unit vanished from the setup program and I haven't been able to get it back, not even by doing a reset to factory parameters.
You have to be very careful with computers. They don't forgive errors.
You would think that Cathy, deprived of email and IM contacts for weeks now, would be anxious to be back in contact with the world. It seems, instead, that she is content to use the new computer to watch prerecorded DVDs.
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