Frustrations of the Computer Kind

David Greer Working

I have worked with computers since I was fifteen years old. I love working with them. Most of the time. In the picture above, I’m happily working on my HP/Compaq laptop. The latest in a long line of laptops I’ve owned. Yesterday, I wasn’t smiling.

My laptop has been acting up. Random and weird behaviors. An inability to connect to the internet. Hours and hours of lost time. Projects falling behind.

I even hauled my laptop to my local PC repair shop. We rebooted my machine for the umpteenth time today. Worked perfectly. Connected to the Internet instantly. Let me download my email. Send responses. Do everything that I do each and every day.

Took my laptop home. Booted it up. Random failures. Would not connect to the Internet. The memory stick I used for backup fifteen minutes previously would no longer be recognized by the OS. Back to square one. Frustration. Lack of productivity.

Yesterday reminded me how easy it is to become humbled when technology lets you down. I needed my laptop to communicate. To stay in touch. I did use other computers. Spent much of the day on my iPad. And learned how totally dependent I am on the combination of software, data, and processes that I use effortlessly every day on my laptop. Photos that I needed were on my laptop. Documents I needed were there too. Despite having a fully automated online backup process, there were still files that I could not get access to.

I’m a professional at this. I’ve spent my career helping organizations build reliable infrastructure. Yesterday, it was my turn to be held hostage to one failure. One intermittent failure. One really hard to debug failure. A day of testing my love of technology.

It made me wonder how the rest of the world manages computer failure in our technological interconnected age.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Patricia Lalonde

    David, I’m so grateful to hear that experts can have days like that too. It says a lot when the techies at Shaw and Future shop know me by name. They are amazingly patient!

  2. Ernie Vance

    hi David,

    I feel your pain; I’ve been there. Try going a few days without internet access. it’s almost as frustrating. Technology is wonderful when it works.

    suggestion : take a look at http://www.dropbox.com It’s a great place to work from (if you have internet). Stores your files on your laptop, in the cloud and any other device like your iPad or mobile. That plus your backup and you should have most bases covered.

    good luck with the laptop woes, I’d suggest that you try a windows restore point to just before the system went sideways.

    Ernie

    1. djgreer

      In the end, I think the problem was related to the difference between sleep and hibernate mode. On Win XP, sleep is the default. With the battery at the end of it’s life, weird things have been happening when the battery runs out in sleep mode and I eventually turn the laptop back on. We will see. So far, so good.

  3. simon

    The cloud is the way forward IMHO

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