—what could have been a site-fatal db screwup. We did lose a few bells and whistles, but we are now running cleaner and perhaps more functional than before.
Bear with me while I get this site prettified again and get some features back.
I’m having a week—the repairman either didn’t connect a cable to the RW drive or had a bad one, or there’s a fault with the mobo and with the new USB ports—because the first error is back, and after exhausting two expert repair techs at Dell, I’m sending the machine in. I have my older Latitude, so I’m not computerless, but I’ve had quite a to-do getting communication with Carbonite techs to be sure of some features, getting the essential files backed up, which at 20 gig a folder is a chore—and the Passport at first didn’t want to take it: technique has to be drag-drop or modification thereof: it doesn’t seem to like command lines. Got that done. I’ve run System Mechanic, Malwarebytes and various others, so in some ways the disk is quite clean. But it’s also in big chunks, (folders in folders in folders ad infinitum) so if you lose a big ‘un, you’re hosed.
THere’s a chance they’ll have to wipe the hard disk and reinstall, because we can’t figure how it would still be a hardware problem, unless we have a second bad board—which the local repair guy can’t judge—and that would mean a total reinstall.
But we’ve spent today collecting all relevant discs, and getting the installation codes on things that don’t have discs, getting a belarc.com list of all the system as it now stands — belarc no longer gives you the key codes to most software, so all those had to be hand-collected—and we’re now as ready as we’re likely to be.
The good news is if they have to do that they’ll give us back a clean install of Win 7 and we’ll go from there with the assist from Carbonite, which preserves all data.
Carbonite has saved my bacon a couple of times. I still make sure everything is backed up before I shut down for the night by forcing the issue and telling it to back up NOW. I’m in the process of merging all my email addresses into Thunderbird so now I’ve got to look into MozBackup and run that before shutting down to make sure all my emails are captured locally. Carbonite will pick them up but a belt-and-suspenders approach is always wise.
Does anyone have a good alternative to MozBackup?
I did, btw, in a moment of prehistoric doubt of the whole electronic house of cards, print out the newest book so far as I have it—just in case. So whatever happens—that is safe.
Oh vey. Fingers crossed and supplication to all attending gremlins.
Thanks for mentioning that Belarc doesn’t give software registration codes any more. I hadn’t noticed it until you mentioned it. I’ll check tomorrow to see if I still have all the relevant codes for my work machine.
Hopefully Dell can fix the glitch in your laptop. So I guess their on-site repair isn’t always on-site after all. I had 2 hard drive failures within a week about a year ago (January 15th to be exact)and fortunately didn’t have to ship the machine off. Tech came out and replaced the original Seagate hard drive with another Seagate drive which died about 12 hours later. Then they sent a Western Digital drive which lasted until I got a good deal on a Samsung SSD and dropped that in. I’ll be interested to know if they tell you what they’ve fixed; I’m running a Latitude 6520 (I believe you have a 6530) and if there are USB problems lurking on the horizon it would be nice to fix them before they start causing problems.
BTW, still getting a “The connection was reset, please try again ” when I try to view the WWAS blog posts. Could be because I wasn’t signed in.
My BFF is a total Luddite. She gets frustrated when her laptop doesn’t do what she thinks it ought to do and gets to wildly clicking this and that and gets it bolluxed up. She did something to her email program and kept getting an error when she tried to send email that I fixed by unchecking the “requires a SSL connection” (part of the problem might have been she had 2230 emails in her inbox. . . ) She also got the screen display cattywompus (somehow she managed to change the resolution from the recommended size to about 1/4 size. . . Spent about 20 minutes sorting out her laptop last night. She maintains its nothing she does, but that as she has hemochromatosis and has an overabundance of iron in her system and that this fiddles with the electromagnetics and messes up her computer . . . Between her and my mom, I end up feeling like a computer genius, which I’m not remotely. My mom’s trick is just when we’re about to end a telephone conversation she goes, “Oh, by the way, my computer . . .”
So do I, and I’m generally not logged in.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but in the Firefox tab above I’m seeing “» With heroic effort, and consi…” or “» Wave without a Shore” before coming to this thread. That character is #187 on the ASCII code chart. It’s not “7-bit clean” as we sometimes say. Some code has been known to have problems when that 8th bit is set.
The eighth bit used to be the parity bit … way back in the day. Is this a hold-over from that?