A Brief Heads-up: Why I may miss posting
“System Fail” by DGBurns
My computer is experiencing intermittent hardware failures. It’s been doing that for a while now, but it seems to be a bit more serious about it this time – to the point where I’m never sure, from one day to the next, whether it will even boot up, or – if it does – how long it will function for before the eventual crash. Some days it works like a swiss watch, and other days it’s a sundial at night in a dark, sealed, cavern.
It’s my impression that I have two independant hardware problems: one that functions when the machine is too hot (CPU overheating, or maybe it’s the 3D graphics card) and one that functions when the primary disk drive is too cold (won’t read from the hard disk). Annoyingly, of course, it’s the newest drive that’s causing all the trouble – my old IDE drives just keep ticking over.
Unfortunately, my present financial position will make it difficult to get replacement parts until February or March at the earliest, as I have to commit funds to some minor surgery early in 2014. So I have to struggle on with the failing equipment.
If, perchance, no article gets posted here on time or at all over the next few weeks, that’s the reason.
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December 22nd, 2013 at 7:12 pm
Hi Mike,
Sorry to about your tribulations (medical and IT).
I hope things are resolved OK next year.
Merry Xmas and thanks for your gems on campaign mastery website.
Regards, James.
December 23rd, 2013 at 9:49 am
Thank you, James. I’ll do my best to continue to bring them to you. I have evolved an alternate plan using a laptop and a cybercafe, and a further plan to ease the cybercafe out of the picture – but I hope to hang on long enough. If I were certain it was the hard disk, it would be relatively easy to fix – but it might also be the CPU, the motherboard, the graphics card, or the Windows installation that’s at fault. I can probably deal with any one of those by Mid-February – but not all of them.
December 23rd, 2013 at 12:18 am
Sorry to hear about your issues.
I am sure everyone understands as most of us have been in similar shoes.
Happy Holidays! And by that I mean Christmas and New Years.
December 23rd, 2013 at 9:53 am
Thanks, Gregory. It feels like I’ve been hit with a 1-2-3 punch combination over the last few weeks – computer instability, health issues, and the consequent financial impacts of both, coupled with the not-completely-unexpected news that our government is once again targetting the most vulnerable in society for cutbacks – which just happens to include myself. As you can see, the system is behaving itself at the moment – so I had better crack on and write today’s article while I have the chance!
December 23rd, 2013 at 9:53 am
I completely understand about financial and computer issues. I hope everything works out smoothly for you in the computer and the surgical arenas. I’ve always loved reading your posts, so if there’s anything I can do to assist from remote, drop a line.
Hungry recently posted..Friday Five: 2013-12-20
December 23rd, 2013 at 2:36 pm
@ Hungry The offer is much appreciated! I can’t think of anything at the moment, but we’ll see what happens. I’m not too worried about the surgery, it’s “relatively” straightforward – just a financial burden that complicates everything else, but thanks for the kind thoughts – I can use all the goodwill I can get! Today, the computer is purring like a kitten – how long that will last remains to be seen.
December 23rd, 2013 at 1:49 pm
Hey Mike, a tad busy with christmas and new years stuff, but if there is some time (maybe 2nd or 3rd of Jan) you are not busy I can take a look and see if I can try and determine what is wrong for you, if you would like
December 23rd, 2013 at 2:48 pm
I’m not going anywhere this holiday season, so the offer is gratefully accepted. There are a number of possibilities, but if you could bring a spare disk drive (even just temporarily) and maybe some canned air so that we could eliminate the drive as a suspect and flush the heatsink, that would be a big help. I actually think there are two seperate problems.
Attempting to boot into safe mode is very revealing: many times the process gets part-way to completion and freezes – no error message, no nothing. I suspect that the same thing is happening on full Windows bootup.
Once windows has started, we enter a phase in which the graphics card periodically stops responding, usually recovering, but sometimes resorting to software mode. I am slowly learning how to manage this phase, but it’s inconvenient.
Occasionally, the system will simply freeze, or I will get a BSOD. These force a hard reboot – and once that starts we’re back at the first problem. Interestingly, if I perform a soft reboot from within windows, nine times out of ten it will go through without a hitch.
The other thing I would appreciate your assistance with is configuring the laptop(s) to access the internet using my existing ISP account. From what they have told me, this should be “straightforward”, with no additional requirements at their end. It may be necessary to use my existing modem, though.
Just tell me when is convenient for you! It would be a great relief to get things working the way they should again.
December 24th, 2013 at 1:45 pm
An update: The functionality of my PC continues to deteriorate. But it’s not all bad news: A friend has come forward with the offer of a replacement drive that he happens to have spare, and I have evolved a fallback plan involving writing posts on a laptop and – until I get it’s internet connection sorted out – posting them via a Cybercafe. In fact, I am using just such a service to post this update! Not perfect, but it will do.
Depending on how bad it gets, it may be necessary for me to close comments on older articles. This is something I don’t like doing, because quite often a new reader will have a worthwhile contribution to make to the discussion – and every such contribution makes the article more valuable to the next person to come along. But since I won’t be able to clean out the spam filter two or three times a day, if it builds up too much it may become necessary. It’s something I’m keeping an eye on.
December 28th, 2013 at 10:05 pm
Continuing updates: I’ve been slowly working out manual processes and alternative strategies for dealing with what used to be my daily routine.
Thursday Night’s post (my time) was delayed until I could get to an internet cafe, but I had time to prepare Monday’s article while I waited and advance-schedule it to appear on time.
I’ve worked out manual processes or alternatives to almost everything, now, and while they may take longer or be a pain at times, they work.
The PC continues to be fragile, but it came good long enough for me to complete a system restore. This seems to have helped the boot-up problem somewhat, without altering the system instability that I think caused that problem in the first place – in fact, the usable window of operations seems to be getting smaller and smaller. I still attribute that to ongoing file corruption.
Probably the most significant step for+ward has been successfully accessing my ADSL2+ internet service using the laptop – which means that I am now back on-line, if not as able to work as efficiently as I could before. These measures are all hopefully temporary, but all in all, I am now in a position to at least cope with the problem.
Which means that if more intense efforts to recover the system fail, it’s not a total disaster :)
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