Route 79

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January 11, 2004

Web for a week

I came into work on Tuesday morning and switched on my laptop as per usual. During the startup sequence it "blue-screened" - and then automatically proceeded to go back to the beginning of the startup seqence. I watched it do this several times in the hope of being able to catch what was written on the blue-screen - but it appeared and disappeared so quickly the only words I could make out were the words "corrupt", "physical", and "registry". I switched the thing off and took it over to the "Office Infrastructure" (OI) team. A very helpful chap took a look at it and immediately proclaimed that it was likely a physical corruption of the hard disk (he called it a "bad block") and that what he was going to do was to take the disk out and put it into a special machine in the lab: a machine in which he could perform some hi-tech "surgery" on the disk. He was going to recover all the uncorrupted data - and would use special reconstruction tools to uncorrupt the corrupted data - and then reformat the disk (around the bad blocks) - and then put my recovered data back on. He was supremely confident that all my data would be restored and that I would be back up and running by about lunchtime. At lunchtime I went to visit him again and he said that the data backup and reconstruction was taking a bit longer than he thought - and that it would be ready by the end of the day. At the end of the day - he said that he'd done it all - but when he put the disk back into the laptop - the same problem occured. (Flash-appearing blue-screen during never-ending cycle of startup sequences.) He said that he was going to have to image all my data onto a new hard disk and that would be done by lunchtime the next day. It was lucky that our team support lady was still on holiday this week - as she is one of the few poeple in the office with a desktop PC that I could use whilst my laptop was being repaired. It felt a bit weird sitting in a different part of the office - a totally different perspective on office life. The thing I noticed most of all was that her desk is right underneath an air-vent in the ceiling - so I could feel a very cold draft of air most of the time. It was also quite amusing examining all the little cuddly toys on top of her monitor - and it was quite liberating using her telephone's hand-free headset for conference calls. I must get one of those for my desk. Apart from the different office perspective - I found it very unproductive using another person's computer to do my work. I cannot emphasise this enough. Using someone else's computer sucks BIG time. I have come to the conclusion that we all personalise our computers so much that it becomes extremely unproductive using someone else's. For a start - I have got so many different "convenience" apps on my laptop that simply didn't exist on this computer I was using. Even the browser - the only browser on this computer was Internet Explorer - which I have pretty much forgotten how to use since I use a different browser on mine. I also had to check all my email through the browser - as I simply didn't want to re-configure Outlook on someone else's PC. The following lunchtime - the Office Infrastructure support chap informed me that it would actually be ready by the end of the day. At the end of the day he put the brand new imaged disk into my laptop - and booted it up. I watched over his shoulder as it proceeded to do exactly what it was doing before - blue-screening in a never-ending startup cycle. He scratched his head and then suggested that it was something wrong with the laptop - and that the laptop was somehow electrically corrupting the hard disk. So he said he would have to image a new disk again - and this time he would put it into a new laptop as well. He told me that the old laptop would be sent off to Toshiba for repair or replacement given that it was still under warranty. He apologised and told me that I would be back up and running again by the end of the next day. He also informed me that I was only going to be able to recover my "personal profile data" - and that any other programs that I had installed on it were going to have to be reinstalled. Ouch! Anyway - I now have a new laptop - it's bigger, better and faster than my last one! And I now also have Microsoft XP Professional - whereas my last one was Windows 2000 Professsional. It seems to be a lot faster and a lot slicker. I spent all of Saturday downloading and re-installing all my apps - which was not as easy as it sounds as some of them involved serial numbers, activation codes and licence keys which I had to search for in old emails or by going onto websites "lost keys" pages. I also found a little time to play with my new camera - which is going to take me at least a year to figure out how to use all the various features! But here is a test picture of the freshly graffitid Route 79 bus stop across the road from my house.

Posted by jag at January 11, 2004 02:53 PM

Comments

Posted by: Lisa at January 11, 2004 04:15 PM

Posted by: Jag at January 11, 2004 06:15 PM

Posted by: Remi at January 11, 2004 09:54 PM

Posted by: Jag at January 11, 2004 09:57 PM

Posted by: sat at January 12, 2004 05:07 AM

Posted by: Amrita at January 12, 2004 03:42 PM

Posted by: Jag at January 12, 2004 10:10 PM

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