3 Months since ...

It had been 3 months since I'd last backed up my hard drive to my computer. To some, 3 months is not too long but to those of us who are constantly updating and maintaining the data (pictures, financial information, videos, music), 3 months is a very long time.

As I sat at my desk awaiting the arrival of our good friends Gary and Ricia, I realized that my screen had just gone blank. I moved the mouse and then checked to make sure that it was on. Yep, it was on and the mouse movement did nothing.

I rebooted. It worked fine. Must be just my imagination.

It froze 2 hours later. No mouse movement. Escape did nothing. CR did nothing. I had to perform a "hard reboot" and then I did something called a "system restore." A system restore is intended to turn back hands of time, as far as your computer is concerned, to a point in the past before whatever problem you have took over your computer.

This worked until the next morning when, after sending two emails, she died again.

I rebooted and got into Command Mode or as it used to be called MS-DOS. I was able to back up my data onto an external drive. It took an hour or 2 but I got it there. PHEW! Then I tried restoring the computer back to its factory settings. No help, still dead.

Late at night, I called HP Support. It was a pleasant conversation with India. They verified that I was under maintenance contract. I told them that I thought I had a hard drive problem on the drive that houses Windows Vista. Naturally, they attempted to fix a ficticious software problem. They went down the same path that I had already gone down. It is not unexpected. They have to eliminate the easy problem candidates before tackling the hard ones.

Two hours later they told me that they were going to ship me a new CD of Windows Vista. "But you haven't fixed anything! You have no idea what has caused this."

"Yes, we have diagnosed that Windoes Vista is not operating properly" she said.
"It's a hard drive failure," I complained.

She argued and only relented when I refused to close the ticket.

"Ok, we can do a hardware test."

The first test showed no issue but as she was telling me how right she was, I ran the second test. Sure enough, it was a hard drive failure ...

So, if you are wondering where my posts have been ... now you know. I'm back operating from my laptop that I'm sharing and waiting for my new PC to come!

My best to all!