So when I got home last Tuesday, my mom mentioned that her laptop had been acting up. Giving it several cursory glances, I promised to do whatever needed dealing with to make it stop acting slower than a dead sloth. Earlier today, I sat down at it to run diagnostics. No virii, no spyware, no malware, no suspicious programs, nothing. Any number of cleanup tactics didn't work, all of the while making it clearer and clearer that this computer needed reformatting.
Sadly, because I didn't come to Ohio thinking that I would be doing much computer maintenance, I left most of my software and tools in Texas. Thus I commenced with downloading images of the cds that I would need and wandered off to do other things. Mid-afternoon I came back to check on the images and commenced backing up all of Mom's stuff. Around 11 or so, I was finally ready... or so I thought.
"Oh... oops. Jonny doesn't have burning software on his computer. Guess I ought to download that so that I can use it to burn those images for Mom's computer." And thus I commenced getting those and chatted with Anna, praying that this wouldn't keep me up too late. Shortly after midnight (eastern) Anna went to bed and I decided that it was time to get to work.
"Great, now I've got cd-burning installed on the relatively-new desktop machine. Let's burn some cd's. Wait... no burner?" It was true, the only two machines (out of 5) in the house with burners attached to them were my brother's laptop (which was locked-down in his bedroom with him asleep) and the old family computer (which is powered-down and disconnected at the moment.) Silly me, I figured Jonny would salvage the burner to place in the new machine... turns out he's too lazy. So now I have to go drag the machine up from the basement and connect it to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, network or go wake up Geoff and thieve his laptop. I cursed and went to get a coke.
20 minutes later, I'm still cursing and realizing that I don't think well when I'm stressed-out and tired. But wait... the external DVD burner might still be in the Living Room with all of the stuff from Dad's picture digitizing project. And sure enough... it was. It even had the cd's for the software and drivers it needed. So there I went, uninstalling the burning software from the new machine to install the new burning software and configure the dvd burner. And after 5 restarts, I burned off my cd's and now I was finally ready to go... and it was 1 am.
I started the computer reformatting, and began to suspect the problem with Mom's computer all along was the hard drive. Reformatting in NTFS kept me there until about 3 am. At this point, I started installing and updating, while trying to stay awake and read my books. It's now about 4, and I have decided that I will do something stupid if I didn't get to sleep... assuming I haven't already. My ride to the airport leaves at 10.45 and there's still a lot of stuff not done like packing and finishing transferring files back.
Stay tuned...
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at August 10, 2004 02:54 AM | TrackBack