Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Called The Owl Woman last night to make sure she wasn't anywhere near the Cornwall flash-floods that happened yesterday, thankfully she was miles away in a different part of the county. All I can say is thank Christ that Super John Prescott was on hand and ready to slip into an unflattering wetsuit at the first site of trouble. Apparently it's the remains of hurricane Bonnie, I don't know, these American weather systems, they come over here...
Anyway, my weekend was fun. To try and work out why my computer keeps crashing the lovely technical support people that PC World signed me up for as part of their warranty program take the opinion that a customer won't see hide or hair of an engineer until they've exhausted all the options for sorting a problem out that don't involve screwdrivers. So I had to reinstall Windows XP. So I had to spend two hours on Friday night backing up my files (and deciding which ones to forgot so, once reinstalled I could scream "Oh no, I forgot to save..."). So I put in the recovery disk. So the computer then did stuff for about another two hours. I had some food, watched some TV. Once it finally looked like it had finished it decided to look like it had crashed. Looking back I'm not sure that it had, there was a program on the screen called 'Windows Burnin' which I'd never seen before but, because it said it was shutting down and stayed that way for around thirty minutes I made the mistake of thinking that the computer had crashed. I quit out of it and, surprise surprise, the reinstall had failed.
I tried again Saturday morning before work, it crashed again, though at a completely different point and definitely not my fault this time. So, another call to technical support when I got home from work. Two crashes still didn't merit an engineer though, now 'exhausting all other options' seemed to include 'trying to figure out why Windows XP wouldn't reinstall to see whether a clean new version of Windows XP would still crash'. I was expecting that if this didn't work that they'd probably string me out further, that I would be sent on a quest to Blackpool to slay a mighty dragon as part of the procedure to find out why XP wasn't installing in order to...
Rather than waste the 30p it probably costs in order to produce a seperate CD recovery disk a few years back Packard Bell decided to store the recovery information on the hard-disk itself. Quite how they stop this from getting corrupted I don't know, but on the recovery floppy disk there's a program that's supposed to scan this part of the hard disk to see if it's corrupted. "What if it is corrupted?" I asked. "Engineer! At last!" I thought. "Oh, you'd have to phone up Packard Bell and ask them to send you the CD-Roms to reinstall Windows XP. Probably take four to five working days." So he gave me instructions on how to escape to DOS from the recovery program and start this disk-checking thingumy. Which didn't appear to be on the floppy disk. "I don't understand," said he, "it's standard kit on all recovery disks." He asked if I had a working computer that could download the piece of software that I needed to help fix my broken computer. Erm, no. "Engineer now surely!" I thought. "Do you live near a PC World?" He asked. "Ye-es," I said warily, although the fact that I was running up huge phone bills with him rather than dumping the problem on PC World's lap should have been a clue that I had foolishly thought technical support the easier option. "Go to them and ask them to do you a new disk and make sure it has program x on it." (Where program x equals whatever it was I needed to check my computer). I sighed and hung up for the evening.
Sunday morning and it was along to PC World. It's only about a mile and a half away but any other time of the week getting there by public transport is a real pain as it crosses several different congestion routes. But Sunday morning it was fairly easy. When I asked at the desk for a new disk the first guy said that they didn't do them any more, despite me saying that their own technical support people had said they did. Luckily spotty teenager number two was more on the ball and able to sort me out a disk. Back home and back on the phone to a different technical support guy, it took a little while for newguy to work out how to get it started, but when he did I realised this had been on my original floppy as well, but Saturday Night Guy hadn't known how to get it to work. I was supposed to be going out on Sunday afternoon to meet some people for a picnic in a park, instead I had to stay home and watch my computer do some very long scans of itself which eventually all finished to say there was nothing wrong with it. So all I could do was the reinstall AGAIN, leaving well enough alone until I had a blank desktop in front of me to see it had worked.
I was advised to leave the computer alone for a couple of hours to see if it crashed. It didn't, and come Sunday evening I started reloading programs and files back on to it. By late Sunday evening I had all the programs and the modem sorted out, yesterday morning I was getting my anti-virus and firewall working too. And after I'd got it all how I wanted it... it crashed twice. I haven't bothered phoning technical support again yet. Mainly because if we've finally reached the end of all their 'things to do instead' list I'm working until the end of the week anyway. But during one of those long conversations with technical support people they said that the crashing might be due to a malfunctioning fan or clogged heat sink, so my plan is that, unless the computer becomes unusable between now and Thursday week, when I'm up to Manchester for Bicon, I'm going to take it in to PC World and hopefully leave it to them to check if it's either of those things or something else.
So that was my weekend...
Anyway, my weekend was fun. To try and work out why my computer keeps crashing the lovely technical support people that PC World signed me up for as part of their warranty program take the opinion that a customer won't see hide or hair of an engineer until they've exhausted all the options for sorting a problem out that don't involve screwdrivers. So I had to reinstall Windows XP. So I had to spend two hours on Friday night backing up my files (and deciding which ones to forgot so, once reinstalled I could scream "Oh no, I forgot to save..."). So I put in the recovery disk. So the computer then did stuff for about another two hours. I had some food, watched some TV. Once it finally looked like it had finished it decided to look like it had crashed. Looking back I'm not sure that it had, there was a program on the screen called 'Windows Burnin' which I'd never seen before but, because it said it was shutting down and stayed that way for around thirty minutes I made the mistake of thinking that the computer had crashed. I quit out of it and, surprise surprise, the reinstall had failed.
I tried again Saturday morning before work, it crashed again, though at a completely different point and definitely not my fault this time. So, another call to technical support when I got home from work. Two crashes still didn't merit an engineer though, now 'exhausting all other options' seemed to include 'trying to figure out why Windows XP wouldn't reinstall to see whether a clean new version of Windows XP would still crash'. I was expecting that if this didn't work that they'd probably string me out further, that I would be sent on a quest to Blackpool to slay a mighty dragon as part of the procedure to find out why XP wasn't installing in order to...
Rather than waste the 30p it probably costs in order to produce a seperate CD recovery disk a few years back Packard Bell decided to store the recovery information on the hard-disk itself. Quite how they stop this from getting corrupted I don't know, but on the recovery floppy disk there's a program that's supposed to scan this part of the hard disk to see if it's corrupted. "What if it is corrupted?" I asked. "Engineer! At last!" I thought. "Oh, you'd have to phone up Packard Bell and ask them to send you the CD-Roms to reinstall Windows XP. Probably take four to five working days." So he gave me instructions on how to escape to DOS from the recovery program and start this disk-checking thingumy. Which didn't appear to be on the floppy disk. "I don't understand," said he, "it's standard kit on all recovery disks." He asked if I had a working computer that could download the piece of software that I needed to help fix my broken computer. Erm, no. "Engineer now surely!" I thought. "Do you live near a PC World?" He asked. "Ye-es," I said warily, although the fact that I was running up huge phone bills with him rather than dumping the problem on PC World's lap should have been a clue that I had foolishly thought technical support the easier option. "Go to them and ask them to do you a new disk and make sure it has program x on it." (Where program x equals whatever it was I needed to check my computer). I sighed and hung up for the evening.
Sunday morning and it was along to PC World. It's only about a mile and a half away but any other time of the week getting there by public transport is a real pain as it crosses several different congestion routes. But Sunday morning it was fairly easy. When I asked at the desk for a new disk the first guy said that they didn't do them any more, despite me saying that their own technical support people had said they did. Luckily spotty teenager number two was more on the ball and able to sort me out a disk. Back home and back on the phone to a different technical support guy, it took a little while for newguy to work out how to get it started, but when he did I realised this had been on my original floppy as well, but Saturday Night Guy hadn't known how to get it to work. I was supposed to be going out on Sunday afternoon to meet some people for a picnic in a park, instead I had to stay home and watch my computer do some very long scans of itself which eventually all finished to say there was nothing wrong with it. So all I could do was the reinstall AGAIN, leaving well enough alone until I had a blank desktop in front of me to see it had worked.
I was advised to leave the computer alone for a couple of hours to see if it crashed. It didn't, and come Sunday evening I started reloading programs and files back on to it. By late Sunday evening I had all the programs and the modem sorted out, yesterday morning I was getting my anti-virus and firewall working too. And after I'd got it all how I wanted it... it crashed twice. I haven't bothered phoning technical support again yet. Mainly because if we've finally reached the end of all their 'things to do instead' list I'm working until the end of the week anyway. But during one of those long conversations with technical support people they said that the crashing might be due to a malfunctioning fan or clogged heat sink, so my plan is that, unless the computer becomes unusable between now and Thursday week, when I'm up to Manchester for Bicon, I'm going to take it in to PC World and hopefully leave it to them to check if it's either of those things or something else.
So that was my weekend...
