Ding dong, the Dell is dead.
Note: This entry will be 67% more entertaining if you’ve read the first part.
When we last left our hero, she was waiting for the prognosis on her computer…
*fade up from black*
After not hearing anything for several more hours into the afternoon, I called Tech Support and asked for an update. I was told that they would have my technician contact me directly. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t take another two hours for him to call me back. It actually only took about five minutes. Unfortunately, the good speed did not come with good news. Chris (I knew I’d remember his name eventually) and another technician were quite perplexed. They took the three hard drives out of my machine and tried them one by one in another system, expecting that the drives would be recognized and show up. But nothing with this has gone as expected. None of the drives would show up. That’s right, somehow all three of my drives managed to fail at once. But they were still working on any solutions and he’d let me know their progress.
The second phone call included the hightlight question of “do you really need any of the data on these drives?” Gee, let me think about that… Of course not, I just keep 300GB of data laying around for kicks. I was given the inspiring odds that there was a ten percent chance that my 200GB drive could be salvaged. And really, most of the data that is on that drive is backed up, its the program and the web analysis profiles that are important. If the program has to be reinstalled, then the data doesn’t really matter because I can pull it off of DVD. I’m not looking forward to rebuilding my whole web analysis setup again. It will be at least a week of work. Joy.
The third phone call started with the grim declaration of “throwing in the towel on this machine.”
Get out your forks, kids, my machine is done.
He had to contact his supervisor but felt fairly confident that he would concur that this Dell has outgrown its usefulness. I’d had several bad system crashes in the past couple of years and at some point the case stopped being able to be closed. Apparently there was quite a family of dust bunnies living in it. His count was sixteen. Somehow I don’t think that much dust was helping the cooling situation at all.
I was instructed to spec out another machine and pass those specs along to the appropriate parties. Because I do keep some things on paper and have them organized, I found the original specs from my now deceased system. They were from October 2001. I did not realize my system was that old. When it worked, it was good, but when it didn’t, it was horrid.
I went to the Dell website to see what was available these days. Holy too many options, Batman! I see what Lisa was talking about. In the end, I looked at the original specs and just doubled or tripled it. Or in the case of the hard drive space, I octupled it.
Ok, so that’s not a real word, but you get what I’m saying, right? 8x the amount…
I put together my wants and wrote them out on a piece of paper, which I then made copies of and hand-delivered to the appropriate parties. Old school :cc.
I closed up shop last night really not knowing how long my shop is going to be migratory.
*star wipe to this morning*
I returned this morning to find printed out emails on my chair. How many trees must die because my computer died? When does the tragedy end???
Talked to Steve and we lamented my on-going bad luck with this kind of stuff. He wasn’t sure how pleased IT would be with me having my personal computer on the network via a wireless connection that I set up. I was going to be really irritated if I was making the effort to be able to be semi-productive and working on some projects, rather than just dusting my cube, reading a book, and honing my solitare skills, and then IT was going to shut me down for violating some protocol.
I’m all set up now with my 19″ Dell flatscreen monitor extending my desktop from my Powerbook. I like it. Hey, I’m on a Mac now. I’m happy. I’d stay like this forever if I just had access to my work email account.
Stef from IT came down to discuss the short-term status of my computing needs. He agreed that it was time to get me a new machine and that he was talking with our purchasing dude about what would be the best system. They’re talking about getting me some kind of redundant system, either a RAID or a mirrored drive set-up, which was more than I was asking for originally, so cool. Of course, since this will be a brand-new system that isn’t just a standard configuration, it has to be ordered and get here and then be configured to company specs and then all my non-standard software has to be installed and blah blah dee dah. Short term, we’re looking at probably ten days until I’m back up.
IT offered to build me another box to just get me by until then, but I said as long as they are ok with me using my own computer, I’m fine with it. Especially considering I know from experience, that it would take them until the end of the week to get a standard PC setup. I just need email access from another machine for now. The expected “do you have virus software installed” question came up. They’re worried about me infecting the network. Oh how that makes me laugh. But not nearly as much as that they were worried that my little wireless network would be open to hackers in the area. Its an Airport Express, the range of the signal is so small that I doubt I could go down the hall to the restroom with my laptop and still get a signal. (Though I may have to test that.) Nevermind that our campus is surrounded by nearly 200 yards of green space. No one is just going to rollup and get this signal. And its WAP encrypted besides. Heck, I don’t even remember the password. The only reason I didn’t have to reboot the whole setup is because my computer was still set to recognize it from when I used it in my old apartment.
Oh and don’t forget, the only reason I need to use the wireless connection is because Chris sliced the ethernet connection in my cube with a pocketknife yesterday. Otherwise I’d have just plugged in.
So that was this morning.
I’m still waiting for someone to come and setup this shared PC that the designers use for testing (they’re all on Macs. Lucky) so I can access my email.
I can only imagine the amount of email I have in there that needs dealt with. But in someways, I’m much more productive because Lotus isn’t popping up every other minute telling me I have a new email. I’ve tried so many times to change that notification setting so it only notifies me every half an hour or so, but I cannot get the setting to stick. Quality product, that version 5 is.
Here’s my temporary work setup (crappy cellphone photo):
That’s the end of this chapter of the saga, not as entertaining as the beginning, but isn’t that how a lot of stories go?
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