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#ComputerProblems

#1 Click this link to see Blog page --> 06/22/2007

#ComputerProblems
The technician (?) arrived yesterday to put in the new sound card on my computer. What a dork!

This guy was the typical computer nerd who really doesn’t know half of what he thinks he does. He couldn’t get the drivers to load (because he refused to remove the wrong sound card from the hardware profile). So he figures the drivers on the sound card disc are not right and begins searching for some on the dark side of the web.

He finds some site that requires a “free membership registration” and proceeds to use my email address!

No sooner did he click send and the spam started arriving. Then the moron can’t figure out why the site doesn’t have the driver downloads promised.

I finally convinced him to use a Restore Point from last Sunday and all worked fine. Between the Indian and the American tech (not!) support they nearly hosed my computer up for good.

I think if it happens again I will just go buy another sound card. That would be easier than getting it “repaired” under warranty.

MjL

#2 Click this link to see Blog page --> 11/20/2011

#ComputerProblems
My computer went momentarily insane last night just before time to go to bed. It kept beeping and flashing an error message I couldn’t read because it was flashing too fast. I rebooted it several times and now it seems to be happy again —— but I am still wondering what was going on.

I started the virus scanner running to check all the drives and it hasn’t found anything.

MjL

#3 Click this link to see Blog page --> 02/25/2016

#ComputerProblems
I’ve had a terrible scare with my computer this morning. It was running kind of sluggish and I decided it had been several days since a reboot. So I shut all my running programs down and rebooted it.

It went immediately to CHKDSK file scan. So I shut it down and tried to reboot in Safe Mode. Wouldn’t do it. After several tries I finally selected Diagnostic Disk Repair, which I suspect is still CHKDSK in the background.

After about an hour or a little more the screen said it had found and repaired a hard drive file. True to cryptic Msoft form it wasn’t explicit as to if this was a File Allocation Table error or an actual data file. The next reboot seems to be working fine.

So now I worry for a bit longer and hope I won’t need any of the multitude of file backups and disk image saves I routinely do. I would much rather have that insurance than use it.

MjL

#4 Click this link to see Blog page --> 03/13/2017

#ComputerProblems
I try to save a backup image of my hard drive every weekend. This last one shut down early with a warning that I had bad sectors on the drive.

I ran the chkdsk utility and it found no errors so I tried again. Same result. I then ran a check and repair with chkdsk from a command prompt from a reboot and it got stuck at 13% for over an hour before finally rebooting again.

This time the backup stalled again with the error message that my master file table (MFT) was corrupt. So another try at the repair utility. Finally, at 11 o’clock last night, it appears to have been repaired and I successfully made a backup image. I always worry when these things happen and it is exactly for things like this that I make so many backups of my data.

MjL

#5 Click this link to see Assorted Stuff page --> 11/10/2021 #2

#ComputerProblems

MjL

#6 Click this link to see Blog page --> 02/26/2022

#ComputerProblems #Microsoft
I’ve had this new Windows 11 tablet for three months now and I am totally disappointed in it. It is objectively much slower than the 10-year-old desktop it replaced. The irony is that Msoft wouldn’t allow me to upgrade the old one to Windows 11 without “improvements”.

I run several file sorting batch files every morning and with the old computer I would briefly see the black square of the command prompt screen appear and disappear as it computed. Now I can watch each line of code scrolling painfully slow down the screen.

The file manager is dead slow at searching and sorting files with the green progress bar appearing most of the time and I often have to hit refresh several times to get the file manager to update the view of new or renamed files. Dead slow.

Windows 11 is, however, very pretty. It is also obviously tuned to run Internet browsers and multi-media quite efficiently. The better to watch YouTube and scroll through Internet trivia I guess.

Excel spreadsheets not so much.

MjL