Besides being consumed by life, the College Application Process, and other endeavors that have demanded a bit more of my attention than a lowly blog, I’ve also been back fighting the zombies of cyperspace, who seem to have something against me being able to actually use any computer I want to call my own.
On Friday, as I was trying to enjoy my newly-installed copy of Windows Media Player 11 (don’t ask me if I did or not, I didn’t really get far enough along to pass judgment), I started encountering a number of “Delayed Write Failed” errors on my C: drive. Because I don’t care to dwell on the subject, suffice it to say that no amount of rebooting would fix the problem, and for the second time in a little over three years, Linux came to the aid of a succumbing Windows.
Stalkers and eagle-eyed readers will remembe my experience in 2003 when Windows refused to start due to a “disk read error,” which turned out to be caused by a bug in Windows that wasn’t fixed until SP2 came out in 2004. (Googlers who may have encountered a similar error and want to know how I fixed it, try putting the drive in question in another computer as a slave and see if chkdsk will patch things up for you. In my case it did, which made the disk readable and let me back up the files to another drive. Then I reformatted and moved on. Let me know if that helps.)
Of course, the last time I had this kind of problem, I was running the venerable Red Hat Linux 9 on my other hard drive (I think, maybe I was using Fedora by then). Though it helped me out in my time of need, it also was clunky, confusing, and hard to use. When I got my new computer in October of last year I made a point of installing Ubuntu this time around. While perhaps my Linux-loving, Gentoo-worshipping friends would mock this selection, I frankly just don’t care. I appreciate the ability to customize and such that I get with Linux (I never did manage to get my camera to act as a webcam in Windows, though in Linux it wasn’t hard at all), and while I probably could keep trying to get my system running in tip-top shape by doing a lot of Googling and hacking, it’s really just time-consuming and not terribly rewarding.
Ubuntu is a much nicer experience on the whole. While it may be frustrating that software updates aren’t always prompt, and systems may not be quite as stable as they should be, I do want to point out that upgrading my outdated version 5.06 to 6.10 has proven to be one of the most foolproof experiences I’ve ever had on Linux (and on an operation on which Fedora would’ve left me screwed). It’s easy, it’s satisfying, and it gives me the impression I’m actually getting stuff done without killing my weekend in the process.
Granted, my Windows problem continues to annoy me (and likely will for the future as well–see my off.Root post on why I hate technology). The last attempt to boot it into safe mode failed miserably, which may have been a fluke, or may happen the next time I try it as well.
But in the meantime, I have a system that’s basically functioning. Those who remember previous complaints about this computer will also note that that statement appears to be a lie, but I did manage to identify a faulty RAM module about a week ago that’ll be RMA’d once I can find the opportunity to get it sent out. And I’m also working on backing up the contents of the drive that’s giving me problems in case it is a hardware issue, but until I get a diagnosis I’m very hesitant to declare my problem solvable by a reformat and reinstall. Suffice it to say I’ll be polling a few tech support forums to see if they can vet my complicated and confusing case, and hopefully tie everything together into some scenario that doesn’t end in “so cross your fingers and hope it doesn’t happen again”.
By the way, my cell phone charger and PDA cradle are both broken. Kind of unfortunate. Still frustrating.
On an only somewhat related note, some day I’m going to just make use of the computer and make note of all the times it doesn’t do something I either want it to do, expect it to do, or just really would appreciate it doing because it would save me time and/or make a lot of sense. Then maybe I’ll post my list here and we’ll see if we can figure out what’s holding the world back, eh?
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