2001
| May 15, 2001 Can't we BAN them from the desks of PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE? I have a 400MHz Dell laptop NT 4.0 computer in a duodock at work with a floppy drive, a CD drive, a ZIP drive and a JAZ drive. It cannot hold a candle on its best day to the Mac G4 Minitower 450MHz computer I have at home. Not on its best day. Lately, it has not had many of those. First - the NT computer decided to shut down, every night, sometime during the night . This went on for weeks and weeks, and support had no clue. I would leave, come back, and the computer would be half-off. Not fully off, just half-off. So the button on the duodock would not power it up nor would it power it the rest of the way down. The solution was, for me, a near-sixty year old woman, with added pounds from sitting in the hospital (we don't call it secretary's spread anymore - since we no longer have secretaries - but you get the picture), well, to get down on my hands and knees under my desk every morning that it did this, and flip the power strip on and off. And I did this, until it was warm weather and I was in sandals and could flip it on and off with a long stretch and bare feet. This little exercise would kick the machine to full off and the duodock power button would then be able to restart it. I complained (of course I did) to support (and they made notes but had no clue). We thought maybe someone was doing this at night to save power. Nope, no body assigned to do that. Maybe power was cutting out in the building - we were having blackouts. And we did have a few instances of power loss in my building. Well, that would explain it being dead off, not half-off. So, to speed things merrily along, we swapped out the docking station. OK. I didn't see a difference. Until I put my hand in the back of the machine to insert a floppy and found---a hole where the floppy drive would be. Oooops! I had someone access my floppy and email me my file. I called support. Ooops, they said. They brought me one. A floppy drive. It sort-of fits. Not well. Just enough to get by. OK. Try again. The sh---t hit the proverbial fans when I was working, had several files up, and was attempting to save my work. I save every 15-20 minutes. I am very prolific. I am doing an eLearning course - a conversion from live instruction. Lot of intense thinking and fast decisions. Hard deadline. Deadline from hell actually. The mouse was drunk. I couldn't get it moved to where I needed it to be. I couldn't get my brain around the impending disaster before.... The computer shut down, without saving (of course) and froze. I hit the power strip but recovery was not possible. Now I really got disturbed. I called support. Hey. I LOST WORK. Guess this isn't a head-scratch anymore. DO SOMETHING! They ran some tests. Does it charge its battery? No. Never has. That's another problem we need to deal with. In the event of a black out, it would be nice to have a battery-powered laptop. So I wouldn't twiddle my thumbs for 3 hours. I am not good at twiddling my thumbs. Support arrives and he pulls the CD Drive. Puts the battery in the other slot. We run it overnight. Nope. Dead battery. (Do we know if the battery itself is any good? He did not check.) It was decided to replace the Mother Board. Evidently if it won't charge a battery and behaves funny in the docking station, it's the mother board. They ran off with the computer for 24 hours. It's OK - I had work files on the Mac G4 Minitower (YEA! Apple!) I could do my work. I redid the lost files. I got the NT back. OK. Now let's see. Some of the ZIP files I copied from the hard drive to a zip cartridge to take home were corrupt. Lost a night working on them - fortunately I had enough stuff I could do something else. I emailed the files home the next day. OK if the files are small. I have a high-speed connection (Not a T1 - a T10 I think) at work, a 56K Modem at home. I thought maybe a bad zip disk - so I got out another one. OK. We seem fine. Irrratic, but fine. Just to be sure, I ran TechTools on the Mac G4. It's just fine thank you. Always is. Or if it is not, I know where to take it. But the NT.... If I had a work-around for flaky zip disks, it had another surprise in store for me. Oh yes. It decided to unexpectedly lock me out - my password would not work. This takes a call to support to unlock it. And first you have to get a human on the phone. This happened a few times. Then it did it 3 times in 1 day. OK. Enough of that crap! I had a CCT call open - so I added to it. They scratch theirs heads some more. I worked. And then, I needed some files from my archived JAZ cartridges. I use a 2Gig JAZ drive (Synopsys owns it) and a 100MB ZIP drive (I own). I only have a 6Gig hard drive in the laptop (pathetic, I know). Well, I popped in the cartridge----and couldn't see the disk. I restarted with the cartridge in. Sometimes it gets flaky like that. Even with the icons on the desktop. Well, I had a mess. I had files I couldn't read - my recent backup no less. I tried another cartridge --- and got the SAME directory! It would NOT refresh. Oh joy! Now I was getting pissed. I called support. I found out I was "low priority". Oh, I don't think so! Not any more! They also were still scratching their heads. So, on Mother's day, when my older son called me..... My older son works at CISCO - server guru and Pearl script tools programmer - has worked the front desk - loves Macs but works with all of them, UNIX and PCs. (He has his own horror stories about support. The best is the spider that shorted out a board in a server. Fried the spider. Fried the board. CISCO Web spider.) His friend (at the brunch from which he was calling) is an NT guru - they both determined that the new motherboard had problems because the op sys needed to be reinstalled - the system was trying to access the old motherboard. I had already determined that that was probably the case. PROM data? Something like that anyway. It was getting lost. Now, remember that I had no problems with the Zip or Jaz drives before the motherboard replacement. I informed support that I did indeed need an opsys reinstall. This is Windows 95, I think. I ignore it as much as possible. We haven't shifted to Windows 2000. Or whatever the buggy new one is. We don't use Netscape 6 either. OK. They are coming for the system. (I have to be there - I have it locked on a cable. You can lose a system in less than 5 minutes if you don't have a security cable - even during work hours, even in broad daylight, even from behind a card-key door.) Note that when it was determined that I needed the opsys reinstalled, I was NOT told to "put everything into the My Documents folder"--- they simply picked up the computer...... Turns out, this was an error. I was told they were going to "re-image the disk". PC people like to have mysterious words. Makes them feel grown up. Like Mac people. (Ouch! Can you tell I ma pissed off? Just a bit?) They are basically reformatting the drive. They do this by hauling everything off and starting over. Aha! But they have an old script - and if you don't have things in your "My Documents" folder, you lose everything. It's the only folder saved! You also have to reload software. That would take me weeks to sort out because they did this once before. And I dragged everything - even font folders, into My Documents. Took them four days to reimage me last time. But, they neglected to mention this on this occassion. So.... He did not reinstall the opsys - because, having not told me to hide all my files in the My Document folder, he didn't want to destroy my system. Good show. Instead, he ran "diagnostics". He ran diagnostics without the duodoc, without the CD drive, without the ZIP drive, without the JAZ drive. You get the picture. When I called to take its pulse, he said it was "as ready as it was going to be" and brought it back. Ominous. I rebooted. He watched. I now could not see the ZIP or JAZ drives. No icons on the desktop. Iomega software there and accounted for. Switches set. No listing under the little "My Computer" folder. I rebooted. Now, you must know that every reboot takes about 10 minutes. And I was due to go home. I needed to get back to my son. At home. Waiting for lunch. Never mind that he has been walking around behind my back and can, if pressed, wheel himself to the kitchen. For some reason, he won't feed himself. It's my job you see. He said so. Besides, he has to be watched because he's neutropinic. Any fever, any sign of a cold or infection and WHAM! back to the hospital. So, I was not pleased that I was rebooting over and over. Just before the computer had been picked up - I had been unable to see the JAZ drive at all, showing that there was an ongoing deterioration of system operation. First I couldn't access files, then I couldn't access the drive at all, the next would be total failure. Symptomatic of an NT beating itself to death. Now, after diagnostics, I had lost the ZIP drive as well. The guy from support said to reinstall the Iomega software - I did not see a need for that - however - I downloaded it off the web as requested and reinstalled (while he watched). The reboot after the reinstall took out my JAZ disk (you boot with a JAZ disk in the system - remember, I had one in there) - took out all of it - the opsys "fixed" the files so you cannot see them or access them - 2Gigs of archival data LOST. Just like that. I gasped. I was proud of myslef. I didn't drop him in his tracks. I couldn't. I was in shock. I could now "see" the drives in the My Computer folder - not on the desktop. But, I also could still not "see" the directories of different JAZ cartridges - it just displays the first directory - the one for the disk it clobbered on restart. Hey - This was the problem I had when the system was picked up - the one that was supposedly being fixed! In other words, they did not repair it, and the result was the loss of a lot of archival data files. My work. I cannot recover those files. It was a previous project. There is not enough room on my hard disk to store old things. The backup disk space I have on a server is "out of space" - I get a "disk is full" message all the time. I need at least 6 Gigs. I think they gave me two. I must be selective. I was also out of Jaz cartridges. About to get more. I sent him away. I have the computer chained up and powered down. I will drag all my files under the My Documents window Friday (I have an offsite on Thursday) and let support take it. (They ONLY BACK-UP the MY DOCUMENTS folder - they are using an old script and evidently cannot figure out how to back up without it. I recognized the instruction when he said it - from the Y2K blitz.) This time they will reinstall the op sys - or "re-image" the drive - and I have no idea when the computer will be back up. I have no idea how long before it is useful. My email is piling up. I don't want to think about it. I advise people to send me stuff at home, because I am doing the class files on the Mac. I have what I need copied there. Thank God! Of course, I now have a blank JAZ disk. I had used all of them up before this. I have 5 JAZ 2Gig cartridges - I use them for rotating backup and archival storage. I cannot recover the data lost - ever. If a data recovery team (not one at Synopsys!) cannot rescue them - they will never be rescued. That's what archival means. Off-line storage. I didn't back it up because I had no more room to do so. I have double-images of more recent files. Of course, with the Mac, I use dual DVDs - 6 GIG each. Duplicates. And ZIPs. And I have a 2Gig ORB (offline at the moment) and I just got a write-able CD drive (CDs hold about 685Megs). And a whole pile of ZIP disks. And a whole bunch of Syquest 200MB cartridges (remember those) - that are about to be transferred to DVDs - duplicate recovery of older work from my Macs two systems back. I am a pack rat. But it is amazing that once in awhile, I NEED those files. The Logic Design for Array Based Circuits book is there. So is the Bit Slice Design book. From 1970. Both are being converted or revised in their eBook formats online at www.dacafe.com. I need the old files for the art masters. I get paid for page hits on the technical books. Nice piece of change. See? Useful after all. Guess it's time for a writeable DVD drive on the NT. Time for self defense. Now you know why I love the Mac. And why I HATE PCs. |
For information about this file or to report problems in its use email dewhite@best.com