2016-08-12:

Fri:
Well, the PC ran all day. Bad news is, the Win10 license is apparently tied to the old MB, and I would have to have some kind of MS account to "relicense" it. Uh, no, it's not my machine MS, or at least I hope it won't be soon. So guess who gets to reload 7 onto it?

Anyway, work went fine, mostly verifying bugs are fixed. Two hours of using scan to email in a row, that'll be boring if you don't have pony loop stories to read. (Guess who did!)

Went to the bank, shopping, Aldi was out of cat food so I went to kmart and got food. The cashier said the same thing the one at Aldi did. Something about me spoiling my cat. Uh, no, it's just a box of cat food. They have to eat. She said her cat can't have wet food because it's 17 lbs??? Uh, okay? What about just feeding it… less? That would avoid the inevitable unitary tract problems from only eating dry food. But whatever.

Saw my parents, and come back here. Put everything away, made my one call but he had already taken care of it.

Played a little Drops, got ready for tomorrow.

Hot today. Humid anyway. Had a few minutes of rain, but it immediately went away again so that was pointless.

A bit of skyrim too.

Sat:
Morning one was not what I expected. Of course she was totally misleading on the phone. I thought after a 10 upgrade (so glad that's over by the way) she needed some help with things.

Nope.

Her HD was just dead.

So I lugged the stupid all in one unit home (no real convenient place to grab it!) and ordered her an SSD.

Also started the install of 7 onto the BSOD system, and oh look, unlike win10 it activated with no issue. Curious, that. Now to begin the 24 hour process of updating it.

Next one was the transfer, and it took a while. Had to turn around and come home because I realized I didn't have a bracket in the car. Used to have tons of them, but I've used them all up. So sad. Used one of the ones that used to be in the BSOD system. (Which is still chugging along trying to figure out the updates it needs, by the way)

No real surprises, it worked out just fine. But I was a half hour late to my next one. He's actually using "AOL shield?" Some sort of chromium derivative, which is of course a chrome derivative. Why not just use the real thing?
He didn't have much wrong, and he had recently ran Mbam so I did what I could and came home.

You'll never guess what I did next!

Oh, you guessed already.

The front of the case was getting quite toasty. I turned the fan around and that solved it. It must have been fighting the natural direction the air wanted to go. No big deal.

Huzzah, just as I was sitting here, the 231 (seriously!?) updates to win7 came online. It's finally downloading them. It might even be done tomorrow morning, if it hasn't failed as it usually does.

Sun:
The BSOD machine survived another night, it must have been the MB all along. Sigh. Well, it seems to be working now. Got it all ready to put on ebay, and went to find a box for it. Nope. Unlike certain people that shipped me a system recently, I won't just fling it in a box with 0 padding and hope for the best. Sadly I don't have one that would allow enough on the sides for my taste. So for the moment it remains with me.

Did my paperwork finally!

Did more Skyrim, and found a metroid remake I'm surprised nintendo has let live so long. It's decent!

Mon:
Did fax of all things today, given we had a new machine software release to try and fix it. It worked, so I went through all those test cases. Found a few things, but nothing major.

After work stuff was more odd. Did two as they were right down the street from one another. The first… didn't have anything wrong at all. Everything she described I didn't see and her machine ran fine. Whatever.

The next one is more puzzling. It seems their SATA ports are just dead. Nothing plugged into them shows up. And even more strange, it looks like the MB should have had 6 of them, there are spaces for a 5 and 6 port, but there's no plastic there to hold them.

Anyway, I had an old PCI-E SATA card which I threw in there, and it booted. Sadly, it only gets so far and then gives me "inaccessible boot device." Great. Thanks windows.

But it gets weirder. I brought it home thinking maybe it's a driver issue. like it doesn't have drivers for the card so despite booting from it, it can't… boot from it? So I threw the HD and the card into my old gaming system. It booted fine, and loaded a driver for the card. I put them both back in the HP. Same issue. I booted the card in my gaming PC hooked to the card. Booted fine. Put back into HP. Same issue. I booted into Memtest, no issue. I booted into linux. No issue. It's just booting windows on THIS machine. GURRRRRR.

Next I'll probably see if it can be loaded onto the card using one of my blank drives and give them some options.

Stupid windows.

Got a few calls but it was mostly stuff I couldn't do (like a printer that doesn't power on. Okay, not much I can do there) or reseting a router to get them back online. Minor stuff.

So just book guy for tomorrow and nothing for Wednesday. Probably returning whatever I do to this HP if I get it running.

Checked my sites for today, and now I have about a half hour before bed. Super.

And did I make any money doing all this good work for people? NOPE. So the question is, why did I bother?

Tues:
I'll tell you why!

Shoot, I forgot already.

Anyway, another gripping day at work. Got through all of scan to USB and part of print from Google. I'm just tearing the place up. (figuratively) Nothing really exciting written up. With the new machine control and "final" build of 6 coming soon, she wants us to do many upgrade tests. John is all over it.

Went to see book guy, he wasn't even there. I'll cut him some slack, he said he got stuck in traffic. That seems legitimate so…

I went home and worked on this stupid HP some more. Still kicking my butt, of course. The drive continues to boot when placed into my other system. Either directly or through the card. Win7 installed to the card without a hitch, so I know the card works and will support booting.

But win10 just throws up its hands and says "nope." Don't give me any useful information about why or what to do about it, that's fine.

Even got the installed to see it and try the automatic "repair." HAHAHAHAHA You must be joking.

So at 8:30 (let's see, that's another 3 hours spent?) I called them and gave them their choices. They said to reload it, so I'm currently copying off their data and will just reload the system. Wonderful job as always, MS, making things easy to troubleshoot and fix.

Perhaps a Friday adventure with Sean? He asked about it, and with no parents this week it's possible.

No calls but one guy who needed his router reset. He unplugged his PC instead. *Sigh* No, the little box with the antenna on it. Yeah, the belkin. That worked? Okay super, yes you should have thought of that yourself oh did I say that out loud?

Wed:
Good news and bad news all around today.

Let's see, work first. Lost the morning to the latest software update that killed my machine. Really, nothing would work, not even copy. Whoops. So I finished print from google in the morning before that, and in the afternoon did scan to dropbox. Getting though them. (again) I used a different machine for that.

Looks like we'll deliver 6 soon to Staples, hope they like it.

Came right home, started the reload of the HP system. Also got in the SSD for the all in one unit, so I started and finished that rather quickly. Boots in about 12 seconds, not too shabby.

Also got the part for the TV, sadly it does not seem to be that part! AARG! I guess I'll have to order the other part, and hope it's that. If it isn't I have no idea what it could be. I mean there's only the two things.

Copying their files back is going to take freaking forever. It's only 100mb ethernet not 1000. Sigh. I hate PCs so much. It's been on "three hours, 15 minutes" since I started it, like two hours ago.

Thought I would Get Smart, hooked it up to a decent PC (mine) and copied it that way. Took about 40 minutes. At the end, I hooked it back up to the HP, booted it, and couldn't find the folder where I had put it. Huh? What did I spend 40 minutes doing, then? The stupid file transfer dialog was open, it was copying. Where did the files go?

Have I mentioned lately that I hate windows?

I copied it again, and it took this time. Yay.

Thurs:
Found a monitor and a mouse in the bin today, so now I have a rescue keyboard, mouse, and monitor. I brought mine home again. There was another but on the way back from lunch it got buried so I didn't get to snag that one.

We also got some 15 year old SunBlade 100s in our lab, as someone was getting kicked out of theirs. He said he still needed them to support this one customer printing music. Seriously?

Got through scan to google today, not many services left! Nothing unexpected really. Auto is back, with all its issue. Really wish they would fix that.

My docking station arrived today in the mail, so I'll take that in tomorrow. Should make things a little easier.

Dropped off the HP, glad to be rid of you! With driving and traffic and getting gas I didn't get home until 6:00, so I ate dinner and made my one phone call. Someone had set the printer to 1.100 where I use 1.50 and as her DHCP settings started everybody at .100 I think there was a conflict. Who's doing this stuff they don't understand?

Hot today. Looks like Friday is on for Sean's, so I'll be going over there after work and shopping and feeding my parent's kitties and such.

Then Saturday return the SSDd system and one other, guy that says his machine needs more memory or something. Who really knows?

Got to play some skyrim, started the thieves guild stuff. Should be a welcome break after being an assassin, am I right?

Anyway, time for bed. Hope you have a not too hot weekend, see you all next week.