Kevin Standlee (kevin_standlee) wrote,
Kevin Standlee
kevin_standlee

Must Not Have Been the Motherboard, Then

This morning, while setting up my "office" here in Mehama, I fired up the alternative computer -- the one that used to be my primary laptop but got put aside when it started making hard drives stop working. As some of you may recall, Dell came out and replaced the motherboard on the laptop, and a cloned copy of a known good drive -- a clone of the drive that's on this laptop I'm using right now -- launched with no problems. For the next week thereafter, I turned that computer on and off and things seemed okay. I brought that machine with me to Oregon as backup, and I thought I'd turn it on this morning to see how things were going.

It refused to boot. Just like before, it would go past the POST screen and then display a blank screen with a blinking cursor. This is a drive that booted just fine for a week.

Sigh. I think I'm going to have to go through the annoyance of doing a bare-metal installation of WinXP on that drive simply so that the next time I deal with Dell -- which won't be until I get back to the Bay Area, I expect -- I can tell them, "Yes, I did that." Whether it will actually solve the problem, I tend to doubt.

For now, it adds to my inconvenience because one of the reasons I brought it was so I could use Skype for work-related calls while still connected to the company network through VPN on the main machine. (My company's computer network blocks Skype and other internet telephony services, you see.)
Tags: computers
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