Marathon Computer Repair Day OVER! (Update 2X)

…and hopefully, for good!   After much delay, I now have my new hard drive and a new power supply and I actually hear a fan running!  Because a new motherboard had been installed previously, the recovery disks I had purchased didn’t work. So, I had to get new disks which took some time.  Meanwhile, the hard drive was groaning and occasionally when I turned the computer off, it sounded like a plane was landing .

Then, the appointment I had for this past Saturday never happened, and finally, today (Monday,7/14) the repair agent came with boxes of parts.  The actual “rebuild” didn’t take too long, but loading up the operating system, updates, and configuring various things took ages….so, 4 hours later at about 7:30 pm, everything was done.

Sort of.

Now, I have to reload a lot of programs…but that will have to be another day. I’m TIRED!!  The dogs were pretty well behaved, but that was because I had them either outside or kept in another room and the repair agent safely behind two sets of doors.

And I’ve been out of the loop all day…so bear with me as I catch up.

Hopefully, I’ll be writing again in a day or so!

Thanks to everybody who visits me at this site for their patience!

GRL

UPDATE

Well, it’s Tuesday and the machine is extremely slow getting booted up.  As in dark screen for several minutes.  Sigh.  Called Best Buy and left a message for the tech…Developing!!

UPDATE August 15, 2008

The start-up finally got itself together…apparently, there were tons of updates being done…but another problem had to be dealt with. Thinking he was doing me a favor, the techie installed a little program from Codessesntials called Yadis! that is supposed to manage external drives.  Yadis! however has no support and soon I got a message about it crashing on startup (which it was doing!) and then apparently, an update was installed.  I decided it was time to get rid of Yadis!.  For awhile I couldn’t find Yadis! on the computer until suddenly a folder showed up.  Still couldn’t get rid of it!  The techie returned and used his special software to uninstall it since I had been in “permissions hell” (gave permission to uninstall only to get another message saying I couldn’t do it!), although later I found more stuff that had to go!! (This time, it went!)

I had bought a WD external drive to do a backup before having the new hard drive installed because I wasn’t sure the Maxtor was working anymore!  The software was doing weird things! The WD software seemed OK but then it became apparent that automatic backups weren’t happening and the software had some glitches. In the meantime, the folks at Western Digital in India (hello, SUPRA!) tried to fix up the WD external drive software by having me reformat it and then download and reinstall the software that had come on the drive.  It never seemed to work right after that!  Level 2 support was totally helpless and so I returned to Best Buy and even though I was past the return period, they gave me all my money back! And, because of the non-stop hell I had been through, they gave me a copy of Windows Office Suite for free! I needed it because when I had the new hard drive installed, I lost the Works and other programs that had come pre-installed.

By the way, the WD “button manager” still survived for days until finally, I managed to get it off.  Mysterious, very mysterious!

So now, I am simply dragging and dropping to my old Maxtor external drive and am IN LOVE with Firefox’s little Backup-Import/Export tab in “Bookmarks” so I can get them back-up without having to type in the long address to find them on my C: drive!

Everything seems to be running well now, and having a cooling fan really is giving me a thrill!

Temporarily Down…New Hard Drive being Installed…UPDATED 1X

UPDATE June 25, 2008

Well, I’m still limping along with the old drive. Alex the Agent installed the new one, but found that my recovery disks didn’t work, probably because they are specific to a certain motherboard. The original was previously replaced, so no go! Pending a chat with Brad, our local Best Buy ass’t. manager, the plan is to get reimbursed for the original disks, then Alex will order new ones from HP and hopefully they will work! If not, Alex will then propose again that I get a new machine…we have to follow the rules and work this through…

So far, so good with the old drive, but I’m can’t use by external backups because the machine is now EATING SOFTWARE and changes how they run…so, I’m preserving the backup I managed to make with the new Western Digital before this monster machine started screwing around with the software that comes with thed drive. Alex also did a backup to a drive he carries around. He advised me not to register the WD until we get this mess figured out. There is a chance that my WD drive is now screwed up because of the software being affected somehow by the monster machine…so let’s see if I have to invoke THAT warranty to get a new one!

So, to save a bookmark, I email it to myself. I don’t download email to my computer anymore, preferring to use the webmail function of my ISP.

Anyway, the veritable cascading series of disasters continues

***Original Post***

Well, after several months of turning off the computer and hearing loud noises like a plane makes when landing, I taped the noise and the tech finally decided it was the hard drive, after a couple of false starts involving the power supply fan.

He’s coming tomorrow to install the new one. In the past week, glitches have started to happen, which are probably due to a failing drive: couldn’t uninstall a program, tonight the computer didn’t start right and the system requested I do a restore to an earlier restore point, which is the first time that’s happened.

Yesterday, I ran out bought a new external backup, because the one I had been using suddenly had sofware problems…steadily decayed. This was the program I had reinstalled, but when I tried to uninstall again to try another install, it didn’t happen. Checking online, the support info indicated that the driver wasn’t being recognized and that the partitions were probably messed up. I’ll nail the tech tomorrow to help figure that out, since the actual external drive had tested out OK on the diagnostics when I was able to run them…

My new Western Digital is much easier to use. So maybe I’ll wind up with two external drives which will be excellent for backing up with maximun efficiency.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of blogs to research which will take a couple of days, especially since I have to get the new drive all put together with my stuff.

So, see you all in a few days, and thanks for checking in….

GRL