Remember, when you’re tempted to say, “Great, now what?” — DON’T!
After watching the very intense Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, we came home, I flopped on the bed, and thought, “I’m tempted to stay here.” But no, I wanted to post a brief, spoiler-free review. Heh, heh, heh.
(Feel free to ignore this post — I just need to vent somewhere.)
Problem #1. Over the past few weeks, my computer has been having problems where it will half-freeze after booting. I say half-freeze because it’s only the display, keyboard and mouse that stop reacting. It’s still accessible from the network, I can log in from another computer and try to force it to reset the screen, or get it to do a clean reboot. (This started right after an update the X.org graphics framework, and I’ve got an NVIDIA card, so I suspected a driver conflict.) So tonight, I walked into the room after having turned the thing on and walked back out, expecting at least a desktop, whether responsive or not.
No, it hadn’t even gotten past the BIOS screen. So I turned it off and on again. It got as far as the boot menu, which was all the wrong colors, and froze again. So I turned it off. And went into the other room, to collapse on the bed and think.
I’ve had the same computer for 10 years, upgraded piece by piece. The current motherboard, processor and video card are about three years old — still serviceable, but they could use replacing. Do I really want to track down what the problem is (it’s clearly not the drivers, and probably not the video card), or just get a new computer? But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced it was a problem with something not warming up (once it’s running, it seems to stay up), so if I could just get it running, I could at least get a current backup.
So I went back, and tried booting it again, and it got further, into the startup messages, where it lists all the services as they come up, like
Starting USB…….. [ OK ]
Starting netfs…… [ OK ]
Sparting h;;pj…… [ OK ]
Spartinc Applatalk.. [ OK ]
… and I was watching it misspelling things, thinking “Oh, crap, it’s the CPU, it’s the motherboard, it’s the &@*#^ power supply, it’s…. wait, it’s actually starting these. If it was the CPU, wouldn’t they fail?”
So I think the video card’s dying (this was in text mode, so it could have just mangled the letters), in which case I can switch it with the extra card I bought for another computer in order to run a game that doesn’t work anymore anyway.
Still, I ran a full backup, and I don’t trust this machine to store my email just yet.
Problem #2. Anyway, once I started running the backup, I wanted to transfer a few files over to the notebook. Yeah, right. The notebook couldn’t see the other computer. And then I noticed that it wasn’t connecting the wireless network at all. Me: “Oh, great, the network’s down.” alenxa: “Yeah, I thought you were doing something with it.” After rebooting the router, plugging the notebook in via a cable, restoring the router’s config from a backup copy I made after the last time it stopped working, upgrading its firmware, wishing Internet Connect would give me a real frelling error message instead of “An error occurred” and doing just about everything else I could think of for the next half hour, I finally just turned Airport Extreme off and back on. And, well, it worked. *sigh* (At least something was odd earlier, though, or I would’ve been the only one having network problems.)
Problem #3. In the middle of trying to fix the wireless network, I checked my email on the notebook. Nothing I was hoping for (like ebay auction payments), but there was a note from the owner of a website I’m developing at work. The site’s stopped working. He included a screenshot of the top of the page (not the part where the actually error was) with the very informative comment, “Site does not seem to be working.” Gee, thanks. So I checked it, and apparently I managed to upload some of the changes I made today to the wrong place. Breaking the home page. And the previous versions were in exactly two places: (1) my computer at work, which is behind a firewall and theoretically inaccessible from the outside world, and (2) the backup tapes. Either way, that requires physical access… and no way did I want to go in. Fortunately I finally remembered that all the real action on the home page was in another file, and I could throw together a simple template to call it. So that was taken care of.
At this point my computer’s running, but I don’t dare turn it off until I’m ready to transplant the video card. The network seems to be working okay. And I fixed the website without going into work or waiting until morning. I think I’m ready to go to bed now and try to avoid adding sleep deprivation to the mix.
Yecch.