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UtterlyBoring.com is produced by Jake Ortman (e-mail, resume), a 30-year-old dad, percussionist, freelance Web designer, consultant and jack-of-all-trades computer geek, living in Bend, Oregon. He created this so that his expensive journalism and technology degree isn't getting totally wasted. In addition to editing this site in his free time, he is the IT Director and Ad Designer at both Sunray and Discover Sunriver. He has LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook profiles if you're trying to stalk him.
Opinions and comments on this site are the opinions of the author, not the author's employer, family, friends or pets. This site is powered by Movable Type and is hosted by orty.com. Internet connection provided by Bend BroadBand. Since December 1st, 2002, there have been 5255 entries. Visitors to this blog have posted 16470 comments. If you're reading this, you have too much time on your hands. |
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I Think I Need To Become A FarmerI'm truly convinced that technology is out to get me. I've spent more time today than I'd care to admit working on a co-worker's computer, trying to get it working right. She needed a new cooling fan on her processor, as well as a case fan, and she wanted a new hard drive (because her old one was having fits and was too small). I had all the parts, so she brought it in for me to install everything. Got the new heatsink installed, the new fan, and the new HD, and then ran Ghost to copy the data from one drive to another. Booted it up, and we were good to go. Total time, about 90 minutes. I should've boxed the thing up and handed it to my co-worker right there, but I made the mistake of asking if she needed anything else. She pointed out an error message that was popping up on boot, and after a quick Google search, I found out it was a driver issue, so I downloaded the new driver, installed it, rebooted, and then the computer wouldn't boot into Windows (this system is running Windows 98, which is another problem entirely). So I booted it into safe mode, tried to uninstall the driver, didn't see anything in Add/Remove Programs, so I went hunting around in device manager for the culprit. Thought I found it, removed it and set it back to the Windows/Microsoft default driver, and rebooted. Still wouldn't get into Windows. So I tried booting off a DOS disk, and copying the old data from the old hard drive onto the new hard drive again (which should, in theory, revert everything back to normal, right?). No dice at all. So tomorrow, I'm going to just reinstall Windows and go from there. What's even worse? The system is an old Dell, so that should tell me something about my problem from yesterday. Neither HP or Dell have gotten back to me with a solid quote, so I'm still waiting on them. I'm really starting to get frustrated with technology. Yes, it pays the bills and puts food on the table for my family, but there are times like this where I really just wish I wasn't good at this sort of thing so I wasn't always relied upon to fix it. Life would be a lot easier if I was actually good enough at something else to pay the bills. Update on 5/18: Read the comments. Everything's up and functional again. Posted by Jake on 05/17/05 @ 04:58 PM
Posted in Jake | 17 Comments | Permalink Submit to digg, del.icio.us, reddit, or stumbleupon 17 CommentsThe Dren said on 05/17/05 @ 09:21 PM:I'm the same way Jake. Some days I think I should go be a stocker and Wal-Mart and a stocker at Target. If I work 30 Hours per week at each, that would be the same number of hours I am working now. Both are less than 5 miles from my house, instead of the 20-40 that I travel to job sites each day. I would make about the same ammount of money, and get a 10% discount at each store to boot. t said on 05/17/05 @ 10:27 PM: You sure like to talk about yourself, boring Jake said on 05/17/05 @ 10:30 PM: Welcome to my site, T, the keyword being my. You don't have to read if you don't want. J. J. said on 05/17/05 @ 11:14 PM: Jake, I get very frustrated, too. I'm too much of a perfectionist to take up pc repair as a profession. I've got my farming days, but I'm always excited about the hope of progress and simplification. I'm working on a /beta page (more like alpha right now) that will highlight pc and web design tips. Definitely too ambitious ;-) Ras said on 05/18/05 @ 10:56 AM: Try booting and using the F8 or Del key to go into the settings. You should be able to go into the BIOS to find the problem. Also, from safemode you can use msconfig to find problems. You might need to switch the boot drive and you still may have the driver problem. Heop this helps. Ras Jake said on 05/18/05 @ 11:03 AM: Already tried the BIOS, Ras, nothing in there. I even updated to a newer BIOS to see if that fixed things. I had already cleaned out startup in MSConfig. The computer was running 98Lite so it was a fairly quick and easy process to do a reinstall as the files were all on the HD already. The system needed to be guggted a bit anyway, so after the install and running of WindowsUpdate, copied all the data off the old hard drive, we're good to go again. t said on 05/18/05 @ 01:15 PM: yeah that is very obvious me me me are you trying to prove something to yourself is that why you have to try to convince us how much you know? You are right I do not have to go to YOUR site I was just curious, not any more Jake said on 05/18/05 @ 01:44 PM: T: I'm not trying to prove anything to myself. I'm documenting all my steps so that if somebody sees that I missed something, they can feel free to chime in. Nobody knows everything, and that's the great thing about blogs: I can share what I do know so that if somebody who does know more about this can help, they can comment and can. It's just like when you're doing high-level mathematics -- you want to document EVERY step of the process so that when the answer at the end comes out funny, you can go back and figure out the stupid little thing you did wrong. Jake said on 05/18/05 @ 01:47 PM: BTW, T: I know you're local because of your IP address (it's a Unicom IP). Are you somebody I know that's just trying to be a menace? :) Youknowme said on 05/18/05 @ 03:35 PM: Man, there is a troll loose in Bend...getting on Shannon & Simone and now you have one...sheesh! Jake said on 05/18/05 @ 03:43 PM: Yeah, there's one that's hitting some older comments of mine, too. It's getting pretty ridiculous. Youknowme said on 05/18/05 @ 04:03 PM: I'll say what I said to Shannon/Simone..."what a bastard" LOL youdunnome said on 05/18/05 @ 04:13 PM: agreed Thomas Ware said on 05/19/05 @ 02:59 PM: Can you get to DOS? Do a regedit export/import form the command prompt. I can't count how many times I've saved a 9x box with that. Mark Turner said on 05/19/05 @ 06:19 PM: geeze blahboy said on 09/15/05 @ 12:06 PM: I want to be a farmer too... I like trolls and monekys...especially crap shooting monkeys who don't take crap from anyone. Krystle, SelfmadeFarmer.com said on 08/27/07 @ 01:59 PM: Well, it's never too late to start farming! I'm good at Internet stuff but I really love being outside and getting my hands dirty. Right now I do both, but eventually I'm hoping to focus on the latter, when I can figure out how to make it pay the bills. Post a comment |
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