What a day I had yesterday. In fact, this is going to sound like a country song, but it’s the truth. First, I woke up early—too early for me to get out of bed (5:30 AM). So, I closed my eyes and my alarm clock woke me up around 7:45 AM. I was still tired, so I turned it off. Big mistake. Next thing I knew it was 9:30. Yikes. I crawled out of bed and got ready.
When I came into my office to check my email, my computer was frozen. I rebooted it and got a hard driver error. I’ve seen those before and I knew I was headed for a crash. My laptop is only eight months old, but crashes aren’t a respecter of such things, so I made sure my backups were current (they were) and rebooted my computer. Same error.
I finally called Gateway and they thought the problem had more to do with a compatibility problem with the Windows update that came out the night before than with the hard drive. The technician I spoke with initially wanted me to do a system restore and call back if that didn’t work. My computer froze during the restore, so I called back.
The next technician said a restore wouldn’t work for such a problem (got to love conflicting stories). So, he ran me through a series of tests and said that we wouldn’t have gotten that far if the hard drive was bad. That was the good news. The bad news was, the only solution for reversing the problems created from the Windows update was to reformat the hard drive. Yuck. I’ve done that before and it takes many hours to get back up and running.
While I was working on my computer, I decided to call my new cable/internet company to make a change to the services I ordered from them last week. Guess what? Their computer had spit out my initial request for service and I had to start all over again. I was on the phone with that technician for over an hour, but he assured me that we were good to go for next week. And he gave me his email address in case I need to follow up. Good enough.
I turned my sites back to my laptop. I downloaded tons of programs that I use; I re-loaded some of the software I use; and then I started installing all of my backups (55,000+ files). By late in the evening I was up and running again.
Essentially, I lost an entire work day, but I’ve been through days like that more than once and I just took it all in stride. Computers crash. Companies make mistakes. The best thing a person can do is to brush it aside and start over. As I was restoring my computer I remembered that I had a couple of technical issues with my computer in the past and they would probably be fixed as a result of the reformat, so I even got a small benefit out of the deal.
