09 December 2009

Frustrating computers

Computers are supposed to help us to work faster and smarter, and for the most part they do. But sometimes they go on strike, and demand attention, and this has happened to us. So for the last four days I've done little else but fiddle with computers to try to get them working again.

We seemed to be leaking bandwidth last month, so reinstalled the ZoneAlarm firewall, but that stopped our LAN working. Val's nephew helped us to sort that out, and Val had also bought the full version of ZoneAlarm on one of their special offers. But as soon as it was installed, the LAN stopped working again. Greg tried to help us sort that out too, but nothing seemed to work, so we asked for a refund, and reverted to the free version of ZoneAlarm.

Then the hard disk on my desktop computer died. For some time I've been wanting to get a bigger one, but everywhere I've been they say they no longer have EIDE drives, only SATA ones. Eventually managed to find a 500 Gig EIDE drive, and then when it was installed, it didn't work. Cable fault. Cannibalised a cable from a dead computer. Partitioning and formatting took the whole morning. Now restoration of the dying drive's backups seems likely to take the whole afternoon. And then we have to see if it works after that, and that software doesn't have to be reinstalled. That would take four weeks rather than four days.

Then, I hope I'll be able to read some e-mail and get some work done!

At least my laptop still works, and I'm typing this while waiting for the F: drive to be restored. Thank the Lord for Acronis. And after that there's the G: drive, and then there's that dicey DVD drive to be sorted out...

3 comments:

CherryPie said...

Computers are great when they are working properly and extremely annoying when they aren't.

It is my works computer that is the bane of my life at the moment. It is sooo slow.... especially first thing in the morning and around lunch time.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Steve Hayes said...

Anonymous,

I deleted your comment because it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this post. If you want to post stuff like that, it really is very easy to start your own blog and post it there, then you won't need to make inappropriate off-topic comments on other people's blogs.

There are two kinds of comments that I routinely delete from my blogs:

1. Spam comments like yours, which have no relation to the topic of the post.

2. Comments that are simply personal attacks on other people.

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