Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Blue Screen of Death

I have this great entry all ready to be posted, just sitting on my hard drive along with an adorable photo and a cute video. I'm not posting it, though, because my hard drive (and the desk top computer it's in) are somewhere in Woodland at the moment.

My day started with trying to check e-mail and having a bunch of purple vertical lines pop up on my screen out of nowhere. I thought the monitor was going out because following the vertical lines, the color would pop in and out and then the monitor would shut down. I was all ready to go out and buy a new monitor (which Walt wasn't too thrilled about because this is a fairly new monitor).

I decided to call my computer guru first (Davis people: Steve Bauman of "My Brother Steve" is GREAT!). He asked if I had tried connecting the monitor to the laptop, which I hadn't thought of. It worked fine with the laptop, so we knew this was not a monitor problem.

Steve said he'd drop by around 5 or so. That gave me about 4 hours to clear away the junk in my office. That got done, more or less (I found some things I'd been looking for in the process, so it wasn't a total loss!)

When he got here, Steve asked me to describe what was happening and I did better than that: I showed him a video so he could see for himself before he turned on the computer.

Then he did what I always hate. Peppered me with questions in a language that I could recognize as English, but absolutely no words I could relate to. With computers, I know what I use. I know I should know more, but I don't. If I don't see it, I don't think about it. Not only could I not answer his questions, I couldn't even understand his questions. But, like all gurus, he is so excited about his passion, that he just blathered on while I stood here in a daze hoping I didn't look too stupid.

The problem, it seemed (he thought) was a recent Microsoft update to my video card, which has known problems. "A-HA!" he went, confidently, several times.

The solution involved downloading drivers from a non-Microsoft source and then making sure that my computer would block that kind of upgrade from Microsoft from now on. He worked happily clearing away things that had installed themselves on my computer and severely lowering the CPU usage so the machine would run faster, etc., etc., etc. All those guru things.

All the while the monitor behaved perfectly and I could hardly wait for him to leave so I could get caught up on all I thought must surely have been happening in the hours that I was not able to log on.

When all had been finished, he rebooted the computer and there popped the purple lines again. As it went to turn off, he got the blue screen of death.

So it was back to square one. He decided maybe the problem was with my personal account, so he downloaded the drivers again and created a new personal account for me and then, just as the drivers were finished downloading he realized that the problem makes itself known BEFORE you log into any account, so it couldn't be the account that made the difference.

He finally decided that he needed to take the computer home and run some diagnostics on it, so he packed it into the car and I waved a sad goodbye.

Now wouldn't you know that my plan for today was to start scanning photos for the slide show I'm doing for Michele, so that didn't get done.

He knows that I really need the computer yesterday, so he's promised to rush as much as he can. But it really doesn't really matter. Walt has a doctor's appointment tomorrow and we are going to the press screening of Martian Child tomorrow night, so I can't really do anything until Wednesday anyway. I just hope he can fix it!

Rupert is making himself right at home here. He's a great little dog and doesn't make a sound all night until I get up (I slept an unheard of eight hours last night!)

He's a little leery about the bigger dogs, and he's not too clear on what is inside and what is outside, but basically he's very sweet and very loving. His only negative quality is that he wants to be in my lap all. the. time.

By the time it gets dark outside, he'll curl up at my feet, but throughout the day he is either IN my lap, settled on my shoulder, or on the floor trying to climb into my lap. He very definitely needs someone who is looking for a little lap dog to cuddle with.

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