Repair Panic Log Supplemental
This is absurd. The following descriptions will boggle the mind of anyone that knows anything about computers. I have a dell latitude that I got off of ebay. Its a d600 and its perfectly fine. It runs Second Life. It runs browsers. It runs Creative Suite. Thats what I need it to do. It does not run the Garden of Eden Creation Kit, but perhaps I should focus on blogging and developing curriculum for the D&D degree rather than a modding project for the one of the most outstandingly open game platforms on the market. This article is not about what I can do with my computer. Its about what my computer did.
I was working. I had configured a new OS and installed virus software and Creative Suite, and I was working on configuring a website project. Suddenly the wall power failed and the system went on battery. I pulled the plug, repluged it a couple times. I even changed the outlet. Without any explanation the power cord stopped working. I could blame the cat, but the wires weren't chewed, and what happens later with this power cord defies explanation.
I take the Latitude to Best Buy and ask them how much it would cost to get an estimate. I imagine that I will have to replace the power supply. They plug it in and it turns on in battery power. Not only that, but the HD fails to mount. It can't boot up into windows. At this point I am thinking that the power supply failed drastically and burnt the HD controller and most likely some important parts of the motherboard. Basically the thing is toast. Best Buy tells me that it will be 80 dollars to get an estimate. I head down to a local store where they tell me that the estimate will be 30 dollars.
At the local store. Miracle of miracles - the power cord starts working and the batter starts charging. With not even a wiggle of the cord the wall power started functioning again when we plugged it in at the local computer repair shop. I scheduled a time to get the estimate, and went to run up the money to do so. Then a couple of days later (christmas) I got USB thumb drive and I hatched on an idea. Ubuntu.
I installed a thumb drive version of Ubuntu 9.10 and was able to boot up my computer and use it to check my email. I even had GIMP on the machine! Its not Creative Suite, but I can do some work with it. Then. Then I am plugging the machine in over at my new apartment and I notice that the external HD bay door is not seated properly. I pull it open and pull out the HD and reseat it properly back into the bay. I boot up the machine and windows lights up. Apparently when I removed the batter, and etc, trying to reseat the power supply and get the wall plugin to work I failed to reinsert the HD.
This does not explain why the wall power failed and miraculously started working again, and all it really means is that I bought a five year old laptop on ebay for 300 dollars that is going to fail me significantly faster than a 500 dollar laptop from Best Buy. I also return to my regularly scheduled broadcast of trying to remove the Vundo Trojan from my Windows. It creates pop ups when you open a web browser of any kind. Annoying and eats more processor time than I want. Microsoft Genuine Advantage Security was able to find it, but it came back. I downloaded AVG and am trying that Free anti-virus.
That was about two weeks of hassles that in the ended up basically fixing themselves :blink:
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