Month: April 2009

Resurrection…..Well Sort of

It turns out that my computer wasn’t on it’s death bed, my hard drive was.

For the past few months I would have these symptoms:

  • The power supply was extremely loud after being on for more than an hour.
  • No response on occasion, which would lead to a reboot.
  • Slower than normal function.

It all came to a head when all of these symptoms came together and after a reboot I got the dreaded message, “Disk Read Error.”

I knew the hard drive wasn’t dead, but there was a problem.  I switched the power cables and it worked.  So I backed up everything onto one of my other hard drives and purchased a new drive.

I bought a Western Digital 160 Gig PATA drive, that I must say is super quiet.  You have to put your head up to the case just to hear it!  It turns out that one of the pins on the 4 pin power connector had “sheered” away.  I gave it to my co-worker Tito, I’m sure he can get it going again.

I knew my computer would run Windows XP, but I thought I would see if it could handle Vista.  I think it runs Vista better than it ever ran XP.

I’ve had a few glitches, but nothing that wasn’t the case about XP years ago.

The biggest scare was last night.  I’ve been re-installing all of my software, using my DVD-RW drive.  When I went to install MS Visual Studio Pro 2008, my drive was nowhere to be found!  Vista gave me a message that “there was something wrong with the driver.”  After some searching I found that Vista has a quirk with some older drives.  A quick registry patch resolved this.

While my computer cannot import video or audio directly anymore, it is working great as an all around PC.  This is awesome news.  I’m not feeling the pressure I was to purchase a new machine anymore.  I can hopefully wait until our renovation is complete and I have a new office area before acquiring more equipment.

Meltdown

Last night Rachel and I had a computer meltdown. My main hard drive was not responding, so I rebooted to get a “disk read error.”  I removed the computer and cleaned it out, switched some power cables – which lead to a rant about all of our computing issues.

I’m purchased a new 160 gig hard drive to replace the failing one. I was surprised at the price for a small hard drive these days, for $40 you can buy a 160 gig!

This is mainly a band-aid on a bigger problem, but I’ll remain optomistic.

A Different Summer

This summer is going to have a big change of pace for me.

My wife is expecting our first child, and I am remodeling our basement & a nursery.  I am also going to school to finally get an education that I’ve been working on for a decade.

We’ve decided that I shouldn’t work this summer.  This is easy due to my academic year positions.  Instead I am going to focus on my education and try to cram as many summer courses as possible.

Even though I have been working on this degree for a decade, I’ve only achieved 3 credit hours towards my degree.  This may sound astounding, but my educational history has been filled with disappointment.

I’m going to take 5 classes, with one of them being online.  I’m very nervous about this online course, as I took one several years ago and failed it.  It was the same math class that I am doing very well in right now.  The class in particular is Introduction to Microcomputers, something I could sleep through.  I will be nervous about this until I get a few assignments in.

Here are the classes:

  • CINS-101 – Introduction to Microcomputers
  • ECON-101 – Economics Fundamentals
  • COMM-101 – Fundamentals of Public Speaking
  • IVYT-107 – Professional Presence
  • HIST-101 – Survey of American History I

It’s a total of 13 credit hours, a big load for someone who hasn’t went to school full time since 1997.  All of these classes are in my general education requirements for a CINT (Computer Information Technology) degree.  After completion of these courses, I will only have 2 other gen ed classes left.

I’m excited and scared as hell at the same time.  I wasn’t lucky enough to have a “real” college experience.  I think this will give me a piece of it.  I don’t think I will have the availability to do this again, with the impending arrival of my second child.

So Far

So far I have mostly completed the office area of the basement, it just needs new paneling, paint and the floor coating.

I have begun on the other side of the basement, beginning with the removal of the hideous ceiling fan.  It worked, but did not fit the look or atmosphere we want in our home.  I had a fun time trying to wire the replacement light fixture we put in it’s place, as it had a remote switch wiring scheme.

I have not completed much work on the other side besides the removal of the paneling and replacing the one fixture.  From what I can tell, our walls are sound.  We did have a slight worry since we have a pine tree about 10 feet away from that corner of the house.

We recently had the corners of our gutters repaired, which I think may have been the root of our water leakage issues.

There is one issue that I’m still trying to wrap my brain around, and that’s how I’m going to run new cable, phone and LAN lines to the exterior wall in the living room.  I had believed that there was a line directly going to the corner of this room, as the label on it said “attic.”  I was wrong.  Access to this particular spot is difficult due to the placement of our fireplace.  This particular spot is almost just above the fireplace.  I’ve always wanted a fireplace, but for this particular instance I do not.

My concrete repair work started out slow, but is going much better now.

When I attempted this method of repairing, I came into many issues.  When my sander would contact the patch, the patch would fly out of the hole.  So I changed my game plan, and just filled the hole and not the surrounding areas as well.  This method has went so well that I would like to do the whole basement, but Rachel will have none of that.  She just wants the rooms done.

Our next few weeks are booked, so the time I have to dedicate to working on this is little at the moment.  I have basically the same things to do on this side as I did in the office.  The key difference is there is less wall area to renovate.  I guesstimate that with only 2 or 3 more weekends, I will be ready to put new paneling up.