Gave Me A Scare

The computer arrived with a note saying that they had replaced the motherboard and all should be well.

And it was … for a day. I happily went about reinstalling, updating and transferring all my files, until the Disk Check crash hit me and hit me hard. I was back on the Live HP Chat this morning at around 6:00 am, where a gentleman named Perry advised doing another System Restore (which I had done before sending the machine up).

Now, I haven’t restarted the system yet, but I did finally run a Disk Check all the way through without crashing and everything seems stable. Seems.

All I know is that if it bounces on my again, third time is the charm and I will be burying this thing in the back yard. It has been utterly torturous these last few weeks. I want it to be over with. I want to be able to trust the computer. I want to not waste any more of my days off or my nights reinstalling and configuring all my files.

But all seems well. Seems. We shall see.

Tomorrow I do some fun research for Spirit Cats. I’ve had books out from the library since the computer crash, and tomorrow I am getting to them, even if I do it with pen and paper.

Old Standby

Sent off the laptop in a cardboard box shipped to me by UPS from the HP repair place down south. The HP rep that I had the live chat with said it should be back within 7 to 9 business days with a brand new motherboard. Until then, it’s just me and the ol’ hp pavilion ze4300, circa 2003.

The one thing I do like about this laptop is also the reverse of why I like the new laptop. While the new laptop with it’s widescreen monitor gets to show movies in all their shapely, graphic-glory, it never sat on the lap as easily, or was as comfortable to type on, as my scallop-shaped laptop. The old keyboard feels better on the fingers, too, keys a little thicker, prone to a nice, hollow thumpy strumming as you type.

And when I get my new laptop back, arg, it’s going to be days of reinstalling and restoring and customizing to get it back where it was. If it gets returned after my days off, it will take me a whole work week. In the meantime I limp along in this thing – this thing, with its 18 Gig hard drive that is only 10 Gigs more than my iPod, for crissakes. My new laptop has a hard drive of 160 Gigs. *sigh*

Of course, I’ve never had to send this laptop away and it’s going on five years old. I hope when the other HP comes home, I can rely on it for another four.

Don’t ask about how much I’ve written. The answer is NONE, for multiple reasons.

Taking the Dog to the Vet

The computer, I mean. I think it knows that a box from HP is coming to ship it away. 

Granted, I have done a system restore, so if it’s actually a software issue instead of a hardware issue, I might have solved the problem. It’s loaded reliably each time since the restore, the sleep feature is working properly, and I’m just itching – dying, really – to go about my way and install all my little toys again. And the restore got rid of that old corrupt file name folder from Liquid Story Binder.

We’ll see.

Alive? No, Life Support

Wouldn’t turn on at all this morning. After retrying a few times, Todd suggested popping out the battery, let it sit, pop it in, turn it back on. This time I got the HP load screen directing me into safe mode. Wouldn’t really let me do any hardware checks, so I reloaded in normal windows and I’m here, online, but for how long?

Having backed everything up, I’m much calmer about this.

I tried the live HP chat, and the guy was very helpful. I heard a lot of what we’re supposed to say at my job to the inbound client calls – he hit all the right notes – and the guy offered me a free repair, even though I’m outside the warranty window. (Whether he made a special case, or if this is how they regularly do it, I don’t know.) He said we’d tried all the things to try, and that it was a motherboard issue. I’ll receive a mail-in box in a couple of days, and it should take a week and a half before it’s returned, good as new.

Which reminds me of my old Daewoo, my first computer. The company doesn’t even make computers anymore … hehehe … but after having a candle burning near my computer melted the keyboard contacts on the left side of my laptop, I had to mail it away for repairs. Good as their word, too. Here’s hoping HP can work the same magic.

Off to drown my sorrows in Okami and Katamari.

It’s alive! It’s A-LIVE!

We ran scan disk and a memory test, and the computer self-repaired a bunch of things and then, with a whisper and a bell tone, came back to life.

I’ve fully committed myself to the computer. A second wedding. I’ve even bought a relationship book (Windows Vista The Missing Manual) to make sure I do thinks right the second time.

I’ve actually learned quite a bit for the whole day that I’ve had it. Of course, Todd tells me that he knows all of the little tidbits blurt out excitedly. But they’re new to me. It’s not like I had no idea how to use Vista – I’ve been happily using Vista for a little over a year now – but I was using it the most minimal, almost accidental, way. Now, I’ll be able to take over the primary tech support role, without having to rely on Todd, and even be able to help at work knowing how to help high speed internet customers with Vista.

So, all good, all around.

Thank goodness.

Housework. *grumble*

Something I’ve never been good at, housework. I have a huge to-do list, items I’m knocking off one after the other in a slow-but-steady pace and none of them very fun. After the outside activities (grocery shopping, picking up items for the backup), I’m focusing on inside activities like the dishes, laundry, and tidying the house so that I don’t cringe when I walk into a room.

But then my attention will turn to computers and pizza; a combination designed to balance out my blood pressure as one will make it soar and one will make it decend. I’m picking files out from the hard drive in small batches now, not sure really of what Todd has already grabbed. I was looking at some of the files on my old laptop, but now I can’t locate the folder, making me think I was just accessing it from the wireless. I hate having to rely on him for this, in part because I wish I could take care of it on my own, but also because it’s such a time suck for him and it’s not fair for him to have to give up however many nights to help me. I am seriously considering getting a book for Vista, so I can better look after my own computer problems.

Of course, that’s if we can repair it. We both think it’s a hard drive failure, not an operating system failure. We’d be able to grab the data without any hassle if it was just Vista that had crashed, you would think. But if the cost to repair it is too high, I may just switch over entirely and get a Macbook.

Yeah, this old laptop works all right, if you can stand the occilating scroll feature that will send your pages up and down like a slow elevator that’s had all its button’s pressed before you got on. But there isn’t enough memory to hold all my music and image files. I need access to the music to set up my iPod, and as for the images, I have hundreds (if not a few thousand) pictures from the digital camera and my writing prompt pictures that I’ve collected from Epilogue and Deviant Art. Some files are coming up corrupted, too. My EBooks didn’t translate well. Took me a half hour to locate where the hell on my hard drive the PageFour documents are located – all my Spirit Cat writing is there – and I was starting to panic. I do have it all in hard copy, but I just spent a whole day typing in a part of it. The thought of doing it all over again and imputing the original printouts . . . yearg!

However, I did finish my first novel on this machine. And the keyboard has always felt better, more responsive, scroll bar feature aside. Still re-learning where the delete key is, but it feels comfortable, like an old, worn pair of jeans that you couldn’t imagine parting with. I remember when Todd was talking about selling it, but I am so glad he couldn’t find the recovery disks for this computer … heh heh heh … because I didn’t want to let it go. And a good thing, really, as I’ll be using it for the next few weeks.

Can You Say … Catastrophic?

I knew you could! Say it again, kids. Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure.

Bear with me. My laptop has decided to commit suicide. We found it surrounded by pills and booze, but we managed to get it into intensive care. We have it hooked up to life-support, and we’re waiting for it to tell us why … why … what did we do?

Todd’s grabbed a device from work that lets him attempt to rip the information off the hard drive. I say attempt because he’s had problems using it on laptops at work, but I also say attempt because for the entire day my laptop has resisted all attempts at fixing itself. I couldn’t find the restore disks that I know I burned. And whatever arcane rituals Vista has built into it have conjured no solutions – it would offer to load up Vista Repair or load as normal, and neither would load. The first time we tried to rip the data, the device crashed. Now we’re trying to pull everything out piece by piece, folder by folder. We have My Documents saved, I think, which covers my writing. Todd’s working on the My Photo files, though it’s crashed twice in the attempt. Then we try for My Music, then My Downloads.

And Todd teased me, having loaded up the Apple Store page with MacBooks. Arg.

After having sung the praises of Vista for the 14 months I’ve had the computer, I’m a little annoyed to say the least. Right now I’m cracking this out on my old laptop, which will have to be my home-away-from-home until this mess gets sorted out. After we get the data, we will try an internal restore, and if that fails … getting a new hard drive from HP? Or something.

*sigh*

What have I learned? I’m creating a proper back-up system. I am getting a box. It will have a CD case with the restore disks and any related hardware CDs, it will have the numbers to call for technical support, and it will have regular back-ups of data, as well as a label. I will never, NEVER AGAIN GET STUCK LIKE THIS.

Never. I promise.

It is done!

I have cleaned up the old laptop, convinced Todd to pick up a new (and very roomy) USB memory stick, and installed LSB onto the zip drive.

What else yet remains?

1. I want to create a single ‘book’ for my ongoing short stories. There’s just not enough room in the Library menu for novels-in-progress and stories-in-progress and each individual story just doesn’t have the same note keeping needs.
2. Move over my writing-related e-books onto the USB, then leaving copies on the secondary computer.
3. I need to re-name the LSB files and folders on my main computer, so I don’t accidentally start writing in the wrong place and later lose content.

The only think I’ll really miss that can’t be ported is my Microsoft Office OneNote. Oh, One Note…if only you could allow paragraph indents…I would have never had to stray in the first place. (Nah, I still need the toy-less computer for this to work.)

I still plan to do other writing-related work on the main computer, like pulling in graphics for example, which is why I have LSB installed on the USB, not just the second computer.

Ooooh….sleepy. Long day, but a lovely one. Todd had today off, and now, after a “Christmas Breakfast”, a long and leisurely dog walk, and an over-the-top dinner at the Keg, we are lounging, preparing ourselves for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Trying To Shake Things Up

Since I seem to be stuck getting into gear in the morning before work, I’m trying to brainstorm on what I can do differently that would shock me out of my bad habits and let me start building new ones.

First up is getting off this laptop. Not that I want to be rid of it, but all of my electric toys are on here – the Internet, email, iTunes, newgroups, websites, Facebook, and so on. Many times it’s too hard to concentrate on the work, and when the itch to procastinate hits, it’s too easy to click a button and find another diversion.

I do, however, still have my old laptop. Todd had been trying to rebuild it to sell, but the poor, be-stickered beast resists (no install disks anywhere to remake it clean). But, boyo, is that old laptop ever … what, clunky? awkward? It’s a standard screen, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to rely (love) my widescreen monitor, so now as I try to use it, it feels like I’ve got one of those child-safe devices with big rounded corners and friendly buttons. Liquid Story Binder is small and sleek enough to run on a USB stick, so I’m trying to get that set up. My hand-me-down USB is on the small side, 250 megs or so, meaning I have to pick and choose what files to carry over.

Still, when I’m done, I should have a set up where I can’t do anything else BUT write on the damn thing. Maybe after a little self-imposed exile on the kid-computer, I’ll be able to focus when writing on the grown-up computer.

I’m also trying to think about experimenting with writing at different times. The mornings seem to pass too quickly, getting showered and dressed, dealing with what’s accumulated in my readers, checking my regular sites, getting lost in the news or a download. Just as it’s time to make lunch, or pack my things for work, and the sun is starting to stream in gloriously through my office window, bringing this golden glow to everything I get this pull to sit down and create.

Very helpful. *sigh* So, I’m thinking of trying a different room, trying to get up early or stay up late, and do each for a couple of days to see if any one time is more productive than any other.

More than anything, I need to type in handwritten notes the day after they are made. Already I have a back log, which brings with it its own bewildering sense of guilt (instead of being HAPPY that I was so productive at work, I feel GUILTY for not having done anything with it. The fuck?). Now it’s become WORK to type it up. It’s not work, it’s PROGRESS. Hello! Arg. My brain! I swear there are a few synapses that just never learned to fire quite right.

The are two other points related to the kid-laptop:

• Downside is that there is no battery to speak of, meaning I will always have to plug it in.
• Upside is that I can truck it around wherever I like and not worry about it, since it’s just the old laptop.

Anyway, I should stop puttering and do something FUN. Like, yanno, WRITE.

(Yesterday at work, we had two hours of downtime and -fuck me- I couldn’t write a damn thing. My muse needs a bolt of creative fiber, stat! I’ve been listening to Tenacious D to break myself out of my bummer mood.)