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I had thought, after the incident with the bozos from Circuit City, that the worst of the power-surge recovery was past.
A bit more than a week ago, Dani brought someone in to diagnose and repair the computer equipment. This person diagnosed some problems with our network correctly, and asserted that my desktop machine needed a new motherboard and power supply but was otherwise fine. (One other computer had minor problems.) He took the computers away to prepare a quote.
The insurance company said to repair rather than replace, so -- foolishly, I now think -- we authorized repair. In retrospect, once a computer has gotten zapped, do you really trust anything in it? I should have taken the hard drive and written off the rest.
But they repaired it. Along the way they decided it needed a new graphics card too, and they replaced that without checking with us first. (That might have triggered us to abort; I'm not sure.) Dani picked up the now-repaired machines yesterday. Last night after Shabbat we plugged them in, fired them up... and watched my machine first complain about a virus and then generate random faults several times per minute (DLL problems, blue screens, random application shutdown). This is Not Good.
Now, there's really only one place my machine could have picked up a virus. But never mind that -- if these guys had even powered up the damn machine (with monitor and keyboard) they would have seen that all was not well. They didn't even try. We finally gave up last night.
This morning I picked up a brand new copy of MacAfee virus scan, because my existing virus software wasn't happy. We also picked up some network-related hardware; parts of our network are still hosed, mainly the connection to the second floor. (As I write this, Dani is trying to teach himself to crimp cables.) We also went window-shopping for a new computer for me, on the theory that even after I clean up the current mess (sounds like an OS re-install is in my future), I can't trust the machine any more.
We came home and set to work. MacAfee claims that the local copy of MacAfee is corrupted; this is clearly weird. The machine continued to freeze up and seg-fault (well, whatever Windows calls it) and so on. Finally, we decided to proceed straight to the OS re-install. I've got pretty good backups, so I'm not too worried about that. It's going to be a bloody pain, but I won't actually lose much.
Windows cannot reinstall Windows from the CD, because it keeps randomly freezing up and needing to be rebooted. Finally we decide to boot from the start-up floppy to see if that works. The CD is still in the drive. (Note that we haven't actually made any changes on disk yet; the installations kept failing during the disk-scan phases.)
We fire it up with the floppy -- and the machine goes completely dead. Near as I can tell, the brand-new power supply, in our posession less than 24 hours, has failed. What are the odds that it was actually a brand-new power supply?
By this point Dani and I were both highly frustrated and cursing the idiots who supposedly repaired this machine. (They will be getting a call on Tuesday when they reopen.) We've pretty much written off this machine at this point, but we will try our damnedest to get them to either fix it right or give us all our money back. (Sadly, Dani paid them with a check. Never, never pay by anything other than credit card if you aren't completely confident in the transaction.)
Meanwhile, there was one more problem: my Windows 98 CD, which I'd like back, was stuck in the CD drive of a dead machine. There is no equivalent of the paper-clip hole for CD drives; that drawer was not going to open. We opened the case of the machine, thinking we might be able to get the disk that way, but we could only do that by removing the entire CD drive. So we did that, only to find that there was still no mechanical way to open it.
At this point I suggested that we install that CD drive temporarily in another machine, in order to open it. Dani realized that we only needed power, not OS control, and sure enough, with the drive connected to power and otherwise not installed, we were able to open it.
My new computer should be ready for pickup around the end of the week. Grr.
A bit more than a week ago, Dani brought someone in to diagnose and repair the computer equipment. This person diagnosed some problems with our network correctly, and asserted that my desktop machine needed a new motherboard and power supply but was otherwise fine. (One other computer had minor problems.) He took the computers away to prepare a quote.
The insurance company said to repair rather than replace, so -- foolishly, I now think -- we authorized repair. In retrospect, once a computer has gotten zapped, do you really trust anything in it? I should have taken the hard drive and written off the rest.
But they repaired it. Along the way they decided it needed a new graphics card too, and they replaced that without checking with us first. (That might have triggered us to abort; I'm not sure.) Dani picked up the now-repaired machines yesterday. Last night after Shabbat we plugged them in, fired them up... and watched my machine first complain about a virus and then generate random faults several times per minute (DLL problems, blue screens, random application shutdown). This is Not Good.
Now, there's really only one place my machine could have picked up a virus. But never mind that -- if these guys had even powered up the damn machine (with monitor and keyboard) they would have seen that all was not well. They didn't even try. We finally gave up last night.
This morning I picked up a brand new copy of MacAfee virus scan, because my existing virus software wasn't happy. We also picked up some network-related hardware; parts of our network are still hosed, mainly the connection to the second floor. (As I write this, Dani is trying to teach himself to crimp cables.) We also went window-shopping for a new computer for me, on the theory that even after I clean up the current mess (sounds like an OS re-install is in my future), I can't trust the machine any more.
We came home and set to work. MacAfee claims that the local copy of MacAfee is corrupted; this is clearly weird. The machine continued to freeze up and seg-fault (well, whatever Windows calls it) and so on. Finally, we decided to proceed straight to the OS re-install. I've got pretty good backups, so I'm not too worried about that. It's going to be a bloody pain, but I won't actually lose much.
Windows cannot reinstall Windows from the CD, because it keeps randomly freezing up and needing to be rebooted. Finally we decide to boot from the start-up floppy to see if that works. The CD is still in the drive. (Note that we haven't actually made any changes on disk yet; the installations kept failing during the disk-scan phases.)
We fire it up with the floppy -- and the machine goes completely dead. Near as I can tell, the brand-new power supply, in our posession less than 24 hours, has failed. What are the odds that it was actually a brand-new power supply?
By this point Dani and I were both highly frustrated and cursing the idiots who supposedly repaired this machine. (They will be getting a call on Tuesday when they reopen.) We've pretty much written off this machine at this point, but we will try our damnedest to get them to either fix it right or give us all our money back. (Sadly, Dani paid them with a check. Never, never pay by anything other than credit card if you aren't completely confident in the transaction.)
Meanwhile, there was one more problem: my Windows 98 CD, which I'd like back, was stuck in the CD drive of a dead machine. There is no equivalent of the paper-clip hole for CD drives; that drawer was not going to open. We opened the case of the machine, thinking we might be able to get the disk that way, but we could only do that by removing the entire CD drive. So we did that, only to find that there was still no mechanical way to open it.
At this point I suggested that we install that CD drive temporarily in another machine, in order to open it. Dani realized that we only needed power, not OS control, and sure enough, with the drive connected to power and otherwise not installed, we were able to open it.
My new computer should be ready for pickup around the end of the week. Grr.
no subject
1. Repair is almost never cost-effective these days. The insurance company is hosing itself and you by asking for repair.
2. I have everything except cable in the trunk of my car, left over from my VAR days.... :)
no subject
The machine we bought yesterday to replace it, which of course is a much better machine, will end up costing about $850 after rebates. And I got Win2k Pro, not XP; I could have gotten it without any OS for about $150 less, but that would have involved an illegal installation of Win98 and I didn't want to do that. This will eventually be a dual-boot Linux box, but I need Windows for a while yet.
We still have a scanner that can't be tested, because it's SCSI and the only SCSI card is in the now-dead machine. We plan to point out to the insurance company that it's cheaper to replace the scanner than to replace the SCSI card in order to find out if we need to replace the scanner. With luck they'll be smart about that.