Thursday, December 08, 2005

Post-it

Crunch Time

Have been very busy here at work because it's getting down to year-end. We have over 2 dozen new installations slated to "go-live" over the next 6 week period. The success of quite a few of those implementations are depending on delivery of custom code. Code which has only just now been submitted to my desk for quoting and specifications. There are going to be some looooong nights between now and Epiphany.

It Gets Worse

Around the middle of November the hard-drive on my Dell Inspiron 600m crashed several times in one day. I blue-screened about 3 or 4 times before my computer 'discovered' the hard-drive again and decided to keep going. I spent a long night running Dell's diagnostics programs (no error codes and all tests passed), then running Norton Ghost to create a back-up image of my hard-drive.

On Tuesday morning this week, I came into work and my machine had crashed overnight. No wonder I couldn't RD into it. I booted it up and my drive started to make the crunching noises again (burnt out bearings?) then the whole thing BSOD'd. Fun, fun, fun.

And Then It Gets Better

To make a long story short: this time the Dell diagnostics came back with error codes. A short (10 minute!) phone call with Dell resulted in their promising to send me a new 60 GB drive. I was able to work the rest of the day on a co-worker's workstation. Dell sent the drive overnight (wow!) from Oakville, ON and I got it Wednesday at noon. I was able to switch the drives in < 5 minutes because Dell sent the new drive already mounted on the slide-in/out chassis. I booted to the Ghost CD and my external USB 2.0 Iomega (courtesy of the OC!) drive restored the 20 GB image in 30 minutes. 10 minutes later I was back-up and running.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You got me beat! By a long shot, for sure.

Without the Ghost image it took me about 7 hours to reload my hard drive. I still choke on the thought of buying an external hard drive and then the software to do the Ghost image. The deal that I got for you just doesn't exist any more.

I wonder if the hard drive is a "weakness" for the 600m. Just a question.

OC

Cheryl said...

I'm wondering if the HD is a weakness too. This is because I found a utility online which shows the temperature readings and fan speeds off the internal sensors. Even with the HD change, and both internal fans going, the HD temp is up around 49c. 55c is the upper limit. Given our experiences with the dust found in our tower cases, I would not be surprised if the internal ducting is blocked with lint and 'dust bunnies'. It might be worth pulling the hard-drive and then blowing out the ducts with compressed air.