1.10.2005

I'm back

My last 3 or 4 days in Vancouver were relatively uneventful. Mother Nature decided that, rather than give me the gift of snow before my arrival so I could hit the slopes, the snow would come down in heaps a few days before my departure. And it came down not just on the mountain, but on my street and in my driveway leaving me stranded at home like I was for NYE last year. The suburb I live in has a whopping 9 snowplows/salt trucks which means that the hilly side streets I need to maneuver typically don't get cleared and I have to wait for it to melt away on its own.

But hey that's OK, because I ended up spending a total of 19 hours reformatting my parent's computer. I would liken the whole experience to running a marathon while suffering from asthma, inner ear infection, diarrhea and two broken ankles. Everything that could go wrong did. The ancient computer wouldnt boot up from the disc (yes I reset it to start from my CD drive in the bios) which meant making floppies, one of which ended up not working so I had to make the boot discs twice. After the OS install, my video card, sound card and NIC were not recognized. Luckily, per Tiger's advice, I had already downloaded the NIC driver before reformatting. It would have been game over for me if I hadn't done that. Next came the windows updates. Keep in mind that since my video card wasn't working everything on my screen looked like some abstract artwork. I had 44 updates (ie patches, service packs and what not) to download and install. For whatever reason, I could do only about 2 -3 at a time else the download or install would time out and I'd have to start over. That took up the bulk of my time. Meanwhile I discovered that dragging and dropping and moving windows around wasn't possible. But I kept at it. Download, install, reboot, repeat. On day two some small miracle happened. Everything looked normal again and there was sound. After I completed almost all of the updates, drag and drop began to work too. And then it was over. I went ahead and did all the easy stuff (re-installing the software) and then spent a few hours re-organizing the mess of files all stashed in one directory. I think I deserve some sort of trophy for all that.

Now it's time to reformat my own computer. But first I must tackle cleaning out our storage closet.

1 comment:

Shaky Jake said...

If you do a backup image of your parent's computer now, the next time it crashes, you could re-image it in about 15 minutes flat.

Symantic Ghost is the software you need. It comes in handy.