Friday, July 28, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Disaster struck twice today at the office. When I arrived, my computer seemed to not awaken. It was turned on, but neither the keyboard nor the mouse would make the screen wake up. Same with the other computers in my office. Fortunately, I had a spare monitor and used that for troubleshooting. I didn't have a spare keyboard, though, and although Joel and Cindy were both out of the office I didn't want to disrupt their workspaces by borrowing their keyboards—yet. I borrowed a keyboard from Rodney's office (he was also out of the office), and I eventually determined that the KVM had failed. I set up my monitor to go directly to my primary computer (instead of through the KVM) and continued working for a while. I can no longer easily switch to the other computers, but I can limp along until the KVM is replaced. I looked up and realized I was late leaving for a doctor's appointment. I got a cab within a few minutes on Parnassus and got to the doctor's office in only a few minutes—not a problem. I returned to the office. Not long after I continued working, just after installing the 6.0.2 update for Acrobat (I had to reinstall 6 recently), my computer stopped responding. I forced it to restart, but upon logging in it would never finish loading everything properly—I could not get control. Task Manager would respond very sluggishly. I restarted again—same thing. I restarted in Safe Mode with Networking and could log in. All my files were still there, including the cdrom project I had been working on for weeks. I copied over those project files to another computer just in case. I tried using System Restore to go back to yesterday's checkpoint, but that failed. I tried System Restore again to a few days ago, but that failed as well. I restarted in Safe Mode with Networking and did a full backup of the drive over the network using Retrospect. All of this took pretty much the entire rest of the day. On Monday, I will try a repair install of Win XP, though I have a feeling it's not going to be successful. I had been planning to reinstall Win XP anyhow to resolve the problems I've had for months with IE not accepting cookies and Flash sometimes not working. I only wish I hadn't been forced into doing it unexpectedly. My office is a huge mess right now with cables, and extra monitor, an extra keyboard and mouse strewn about carelessly. However, I did finish and send out for review the mac side of the cdrom project. I also updated the computer security web pages to reflect our forthcoming computer configuration with Dell, and I posted updated schedules for Lucia. Not bad for a day when my computer stops working an hour or so into work.