A Crash Course in Computer Repair and Maintenance:

I can’t believe the hassle I’ve been through lately. Three of my computers went down (almost) simultaneously. I wish I could say that it was something dramatic like a trojan virus or a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), but it seems it was just plain old bad luck.

I think I have the main ‘puter fixed now and I’m not quite sure what the problem was. My monitor would black out and the hard drive sounded like it was winding down.

It was as if it was shutting itself down into Hibernation Mode — but it wasn’t even activated! The power would still be on but the ‘puter refused to come back to life again no matter how many times I tapped the keyboard or clicked the mouse (or gave it a good whack). So I would have to turn it off for awhile before the hard drive would even rotate again. Makes you hmm don’t it?

Of course it shouldn’t even be hybernating at all, especially when I was still working, so it just didn’t make any sense. It would quit right in the middle of writing a post — no warning, no error messages or blue screen of death, and it was intermittent (the worse kind of problem to diagnose).

And naturally, I lost all my work in the process. ARRRRRRRG!

Anyhow, besides taking Betsy apart and giving her a major D&C, I repaired Windows but that only helped a little. After days of fiddling with it I almost gave up until I booted Windows into Safe Mode and reinstalled the video driver. I reapplied the Power Options to “Always On” and changed my BIOS settings to “Failsafe Mode” (puts the least strain on the hardware).

Afterwards I gave PerfectDisk a whirl which is a hard drive defragger extraordinaire. I also defragged the registry by saving it and then restoring it back again. Then I ran CHKDSK and System File Checker. (I might run SpinRite tonight just to be on the safe side).

The end result is everything seems to be working fine and so far so good (knock on wood It’s hard to say what I did that really made the difference. Was it hardware or was it software — or perhaps it was a little of both?

That’s the way computer diagnosis works. Try some of this and a little of that until you get lucky. And besides — who cares what it was. Ole Betsy is screaming like a brand new machine and that’s what matters most. Sweeeet!

Keeping my fingers crossed. Ain’t computers fun?
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Continued…