I have been so busy now for so long that the days really are all blending in together. It is getting increasingly difficult for me to determine what day it is currently and when the weekends are. Every day seems so much like all of the others.
The thing that has really been killing me this week is that my main desktop has died several times. I am not sure what the problem is but I keep installing it fresh, it works great and then the next morning I come down to the office and it is completely dead!
That does not make Scott happy.
This morning was no different. So I made some additional hardware changes to the machine and began, yet another, installation. This is really wearing on me at this point. This is at least the fourth time that I have completely reinstalled this machine, from scratch, this week! This is not worth it at all.
If this final try ends up going sour on me my next call is to HP to get myself a new desktop. I checked and this particular unit is three weeks out of warranty. Argh. A three year warranty and it really did run out two weeks before the machine stopped working on me. Figures.
So a large portion of my day was taken up with that – again. It seems that this is just about all that I have been working on all week. Because of these desktop issues I am just getting farther and farther behind on everything else because all of the time that I could possibly have allotted for other things is swallowed up in desktop rebuilds.
I also set up and installed our new HP PhotoJet printer. We are pretty excited to have a printer again. It is networked and should make our lives a whole lot easier. It was super simple to set up and I was very impressed when I discovered that it had its own web page! Now that is a cool idea. Very easy to use remotely and it has a bit of features of which I was not aware previously – like automatic document scanning. Not that I need anything like that but once you have it, well, you aren’t about to go back to manually putting paper on a scanner! No sir.
The Ralstons arrived in Miami this evening. The car, apparently, made it down without any additional problems. I bet that they are tired of being in the car!
I talked to Antoni for an hour or two on the phone tonight. It is nice to be on the phone just because it gives me a chance to not sit at my desk for hour after hour.
It was a long day of work but I was able to head off to bed around midnight. Dominica went to bed at eleven. My “new” desktop is up and running so there is some small chance that it will still be working in the morning when I go down to the basement to check on it.
One strange thing about this new printer is that it “does stuff” from time to time without any warning. It doesn’t print or anything like that. It just shuffles its internal components around for several minutes, runs its motors, gets all weird and then, eventually, stops and goes silent for many hours. Very weird.
Just wanted to let you know I dropped by. I enjoyed this read, but was wondering why you had not already tried to get a new computer already. I know they can be expensive and everyone has their reasons for delaying a purchase like that, but it just seemed like something that NEEDS to be done.
On the other hand, I’m not computer expert, but I wonder if I could have fixed it if I where in your shoes. And then again, I wonder if you are one of those guys I would go to if I had a computer problem I could not fix. Either way, enjoyed the post, see you around on facebook.
Well, it isn’t like I don’t have five machines so I can live without one at any given time. I really want to delay a new purchase until Windows 7 is installed as an OEM copy to keep me from needing to deal with more complicated licensing issues down the road.
One of the problems with finding the solution to a problem like this is that if it does not reveal itself until after 20 hours of use and there are many potentially problematic pieces (memory, drive, motherboard, etc.) it can take literally weeks of testing before you even check each piece systematically.
Buying a new machine would be great and is very tempting but I would still be haunted by a machine that was sitting here, perfectly good, with just some “problem” that I had not resolved. If the machine dies again I am getting a new desktop and just using that but so far, I am still running. This is the longest run yet.
Unfortunately I changed several things in this final fun. The second SATA drive is not installed and a RAID driver was blocked from automatic install from the Windows auto updates. Either “might” be the problem but neither are likely.
Most likely it is the motherboard, followed by the drive followed by the memory. But it would take weeks more of testing to narrow down any one of them and… more importantly, I would have to replace each piece with new pieces to ensure that I was not putting the same problem pieces back into place while testing making the testing extremely expensive and ineffective.