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My tenant’s girlfriend’s computer lit on fire and suffered a rather severe hard drive crash.  He asked me to look at it telling me the drive held important stuff and I started running drive recovery.  The progress was glacial but I bore through knowing “it was important”.  I recovered the first set of data which yielded a collection of emails in txt-speak about concert tickets.  My resolve waned.  I kept it spinning for a day or two more seeing it’s estimated completion time was around Candlemas thinking it’d magically speed up.  The final straw was when files for WinAntiVirus 2009 (a virus program) and I snapped.  This computer was dead, it deserved to die, the hard drive was simply the device who decided to end itself.

After seeing its pain, I’m thinking of having a new mission in life: create something to cause hard failures in PCs and become the Kevorkian of computers.

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Before rebuilding my brother’s computer I did some troubleshooting to see if I could get it to work again and tracked it down to a mobo power supply issue.  The 4-pin 5V connector wasn’t working correctly and after some searching under magnification I saw a tell-tale bump which indicates something on the PCB blew.  I thought for a second how many people would be able to figure out that minute a problem and smiled smugly.  While cleaning up after the disassembly I turned the motherboard over and saw the 3-inch diameter scorch mark centered on the back of the pin-prick I’d seen earlier.  I smiled anti-smugly realizing how much time I’d wasted finding a defect with the cross section of a pubic hair when I should have seen the scarring on the back that looked like it’d been inflicted with a brule torch.

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I was transferring my brother’s personal files to a new hard drive after doing a system upgrade for him and came upon a folder named “work”.  This struck me as curious as my brother does operations at a nuclear power plant and never has work to take hope.  I popped open the folder and found three links: one to his employee benefits, one to some work phone numbers and one to the HowStuffWorks.com article for nuclear power plants.  Good to know those entrusted with our nuclear safety are well informed.

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I’m still doing PC repair for the summer camp at which I once worked and today I investigated two doozies.

  1. Operator couldn’t install Office 2003.  The box had a 4 kilobytes of free space on its  3 gigabyte hard drive.  At the time I was looking at the device I had my phone, keychain flash drive, and iPod on me giving me 30 times the storage of that device in my pockets.  Despite having 4 k of free space it ran XP on its 1.4 GHz proc like a champ.  I was slightly impressed.  I cleared off some unnecessary programs and installed Office via USB 1.1 leaving the PC enough space for a whole hour of music in MP3 form at 128k bitrate.
  2. This PC wouldn’t turn on and had a slight rattle.  I found out what the rattle was: the processor and a cooling fan.  This was a Pentium 2 that had a slot CPU that were all the rage in 1997 during the hayday of the serial port.  This one had a 20 gig hard drive and I felt someone had played a cruel trick on the other PC.  Repair that PC will consist of recycling the case and its consecrated to remove the demons that inhabited the ball mouse and 5-Pin DIN keyboard that were probably used on it.

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Today was the day of the great computer migration where we’d switch from Novell to Windows.  The migration was a failurepile inside of a sadnessbowl but the thing that really got me the fact that they took my f*%@ing network cable.  Really?  You had to take my 3′ cable and replace it with a 50′ one?  I could take the slack of my cable, kick out the window and repel to the first f*cking floor with it.  That’s re-effing-diculous.  Then, when I ask, you tell me it’s because of the migration?  I’ve met simpleton mutes who made sense than that.  How did we get the Keystone Cops of tech support to do this?  Then you tell me I can have a static IP but it’ll change periodically?  Then it’s not f*&$ing static is it! Gha….

I’d tell the story of them holding up the migration on a coworker because they didn’t know what network port on the wall he used.  There’s two, one about six inches from his computer and another that’s visible from his desk only via periscoping binoculars. Guess.

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I came in today and the CAD server was down.  Nothing had really changed, but everything was apparently broken and everyone had pretty well left by the time I rolled in at 2.  I came upon my frazzled boss trying to troubleshoot the problem.

Me: Can I try a few things?
Him: Do you know what you’re doing?
Me: Does the host do automatic backups?
Him: Yes. Weekly.
Me: Then I know enough.

–30 minutes later–
Me: It’s up.
Him: How did you do that?
Me: I turned it off and turned it back on again.
Him: I tried that!
Me: How many times did you do it?
Him: Once.
Me: Ah… There’s the problem.  I did it three times and between the 2nd and 3rd tries I turned off and on all the services manually.  Remember *whisper* Windows Server 2003 can smell fear.

Insanity sometimes receives the quant definition of doing the same thing over and over an expecting different results.  When it comes to near million-dollar pieces of software deployed across multiple servers with a Java frontend, it appears insanity is a requirement of operation.

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Me: So, the new guy seems to be working intensely at his computer and he’s only been here for like a week.
Coworker: Yeah, it’s kind of impressive, considering he only has a keyboard and monitor with no actual computer.
Me: Wow, that’s dedication.

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The rollout of Outlook has been a bit closer to a stumbleandtripabitout and I had to call into the help desk to have them do some juju to push the install to my computer. To do this, he remoted into my computer, and accessed the Novell admin panel and went about his business. The install process was tedious as my computer is a spot underpowered. After about ten minutes I think he got board and started looking around my stem tray and desktop. He’d mouseover my portable app suite icon, and the Wakoopa tracker and spent more than a few seconds trying to figure out what the blinking Digsby icon was. To “monitor progress” he opened Task Manager and slowed down as he saw Keepass running as a process. After a few minutes he broke the silence held by staring at the installing and finally asked “so do you really like FoxIt Reader to Adobe Reader?” I replied “I do. It skips Adobe’s checksum which based on start time consists of calculating the 512K digits of pi.” I got a “hmmm…” out of him. I’m glad he didn’t find CCleaner, as I think the registry cleansing I ran caused the Outlook problem in the first place.

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I sold a laptop to a Team Interrobang friend that had previously been used as a long-term loaner-top for the past three years.  I removed most of the applications except Office and went through my normal laptop cleaning routine before shipping it out.

Yesterday, I received a Facebook message that the receiver’s girlfriend had found porn and in the process of frantically removing it broke the sound card.  I consider this equivalent to vacuuming your car so hard the stereo breaks.  I picture the person finding porn, deleting it all, seeing the thumbs.db file and deleting every folder containing on through guilt by association a la  “Hm…. the System32 folder had a thumbs.db file in it as did all these folders I’ve never heard of full of .reg files.  They must be up to no good.”

Then the bug of curiosity hit and I asked him what the “content” was.  His response narrowed the window of download based on popularity, site watermark, and performers to probably summer 2007.  And thus the field of forensic pornography is born.

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Windows 7 was nice.  Taking a trip to the near future was quaint despite failing to deliver the ZFS filesystem I’d been promised years ago as well as the virtualized hardware model I read about in 2002 that won’t be out until Midori which may beat the Mayan Apocalypse.  The last straws were the idea that I’d probably have to do two reinstalls of an OS before I could call it stable and somewhat hairy nature of the beta video card drivers on which no blu-ray codec could run.   My personal favorite was the three part cycle of errors when I changed microphones.  The first told me the existing microphone didn’t exist and I’d have to pick a new one.  The second one told me I had two selected and that I’d have to restart.  The final one told me the new default device wasn’t valid and it’d default back to the previous device from which I was trying to change.  The only way out was to interrupt the 2nd “searching for a solution” dialog, not the first nor third would do.

So I reinstalled Vista and I felt at home again:

  • I installed Office 2007 without a registration key, when I entered it after reading the Excel file containing it, the installer started to reinstall, stopped halfway through, said the install failed and then produced the “Successful Installation” dialog.
  • Vista would report an error with a hardware device, recommend I update to a new driver and then show me one older than drivers I have.
  • Finally, I had to have admin access to remove a shortcut from the desktop.

I have a theory, Microsoft was concerned people found computers intimidating, nothing brings one’s opinion of something else down faster than watching it fail.  Vista reminds the user of his or her relative competence in spades.  I missed you, Vista.