Saturday 20 March 2010

*Le sigh...*

I love my new computer. The whole touch screen aspect of it still hasn't got old and it's uber-efficient (with 640GB what else could it be?). It was a definite want and a rather impulsive purchase, but the timing turned out to be pretty good, as my laptop simply up & died in December. Off to hard drive heaven. It would have cost me approximately $300 to fix a computer worth maybe $100, so I donated it. Hopefully they'll be able to salvage parts from it to repair other laptops. Good-bye faithful friend!

But apparently even monsters aren't without their problems as I've found out the past couple of days. There I was, blithely playing a game yesterday morning, killing some time before work when C.R.A.S.H. Machine dies.

Nuts.

After it rebooted, I chose the 'safe mode' just to be, er, safe, but something had completely frazzled the poor thing (what do the experts call it? Corrupted). I imagine it was the game I was playing, although I was assured by the game people that it is absolutely virus free, etc. etc. Whatever the problem, I've noticed that since I've had this computer that the games aren't playing quite as they should be, mostly sound issues and they seem to 'drag' a bit when I'm playing.

I was on the phone for an hour with the HP helpline and what I ended up doing was using the recovery disks to return everything to normal. This is where I'm extremely grateful I forked out for an external hard drive! Everything I needed to keep safe was and everything else was wiped clean (I can recover iTunes). It took about half an hour to get everything back to normal, but I'm feeling slightly put out by the whole experience. I have to reload Windows 7, too, but as the discs weren't included in my package (just the installation of them), I'm considering purchasing the upgrade. To take it back to Staples would mean an automatic $40 "diagnostic fee," not to mention the fact they would probably have it at least a couple of days. It would be worth it to have it on-hand in case this happens again. The cost of the program is about $130, but I'll call them first to find out if they can reload it for me for free if I brought it in one afternoon. A phone call doesn't cost anything and I DID buy the two-year extended warrenty with them, so hopefully that sort of thing would be included under that.

But here I am at the end of my day, no worse off and thankful that someone knew what they were doing. The woman I spoke with did seem a bit surprised that the game I was playing (she even knew the one it was) could have caused this, as there shouldn't be any problems. The computer is more than capable of handling "little" things like that. Regardless, it's fixed for now and that's all that matters. The recovery disks did what they were supposed to do. It's just a pain to have try and remember what I had listed in my favourites bar.

Holiday day 1 of 24 is almost over and while I wasn't at all productive, I am quite pleased that it didn't end in tears, either! :)

3 comments:

dinah34 said...

*phew* that is such good news that you were able to rescue your computer.

& did i read that right? 24 days of holidays? woot for you!

The Asian Pear said...

well, as hellish as that might have been, at least nothing was lost. I'm the most fearful when it comes to lost data. I'd cry... for WEEKS if I lost my data.

Canadian Saver said...

Enjoy your vacation!!!