At Wit's End

The main computer is having a case of the Mondays.

I thought Day One of a week being entirely alone in the office and in the house (save the pets and the housekeeper for part of the day) was going pretty well. I checked in with Heidi and asked a couple of questions I had, confirmed with our bookkeeper that she was coming in. I was going to burn a DVD for our lighting designer as well as your run of the mill multitasking work when the computer froze. Okay, no problem. Ended a few programs and that was fine. I had Windows Explorer up, and that wasn't responding, so I killed that program, and when I thought the Start bar went away, I expected it to return within a moment or two, but it didn't. I decided to reboot the computer. That in itself was a bit of a mess, and so I did a manual shutdown. I did the required wait a bit to make sure the discs stop spinning, and turned on the computer once again. The HP splash goes up, and then the screen goes blank, save for a blinking cursor on the top left screen. After some time of waiting for something to happen, I realize that nothing was going to.

I get more of this, and then I start to try debugging. After many failed attempts, I rush over to the other computer (thank goodness we have one) to look up known problems and solutions similar to what I was dealing with. I called our inept IT guy to no avail (he may be inept, but he may know how to fix this glitch). Then our bookkeeper finally came to work on things as scheduled, which was inconvenient considering it was the only working computer. Thankfully, I am staying here, which means my computer comes with me, and I pop it open to try troubleshooting. I was getting nowhere fast. What was frustrating for the bookkeeper was that she needed to print things, and since the printers are connected to the main computer, we couldn't print. I could have printed on my computer, simpoly by taking my laptop to the cable and downloading the drivers, but my computer doesn't have Quickbooks. Even scarier is the fact that we have two grant deadlines this week: one postmark deadline for today, and a receipt deadline for tomorrow. I tried calling our IT guy again. Nada. Not having quick access to the files on the computer would make things difficult, even though our grant writer has everything she needs.

Then I get the brilliant idea of hooking our external backup hard drive to my computer to see if I can access files. I could simply install FileMaker Pro on my computer and access that names and address I need to send out documents, and all would be good. Even better was the fact that our external hard drive is a hybrid drive, which means it serves as a backup, but also functions as another hard drive where you can access files within its own mini OS. Pretty cool.

Once I figure out how to use it, I realize that the regular weekly scheduled backups haven't happened in aabout three weeks, and even with that (since my main concern was getting database names), the backup is arranged such that it's all zipped into one file that restores everyting on the computer, and I sure as hell did not want all those work files overwriting my stuff.

I was going crazy. I was able to circumvent getting someone's address by looking through emails on the other computer, but that also poses its own problem, since we just got that computer at the beginning of the month, and it only has a month's worth of emails in which to delve.

I decided to give it another try. I don't know what I did, I'm not sure if I did it through DOS, but I got the computer working in safe mode, through which I was able to do a full backup onto the external drive just in case and tried booting a system restore from yesterday evening.

I thought I was home free. The computer restarted itself to boot up with the older settings (I hadn't done much at this point, it was around 11:30 when this all happened), and it still didn't work.

I was going to die. Then, I noticed something that I really didn't pay attention to until that moment; the green disc drive light was on. Was it trying to read the blank DVD for a boot? I pressed the eject button, which I was hoping was going to work, the DVD pops out, and Windows loads.

Oh.
Sweet.
Cheese.

I'd almost want to do and die now, but I'm still waiting for this grant application that I need to print out and send off.