2012-07-17:
Haven't written one of these in quite some time, but I know y'all love them, so here it comes. A true rant-n-rave, just like in the old days when I had to schedule work three or four days out rather then one day out. Those were the days.
The last two days I've been fighting with this stupid, ancient PC, and I'm still not done with it. The problem was it was hideously slow. I looked at his task manager and his machine was using 1.5GB of RAM. Well, trying to, anyway. He only has .5GB. So after about ten minutes I got Firefox, IE and his Avast! program shut down which brought the total to nearer 200MB. All is well?
No.
Machine was still crawling along so I decide to reboot the thing. Now it blue screens! Oh fun! I try to do a chkdsk but the "volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems" or something like that. Super. I try to get his data off by plugging into another PC he has, no dice.
I plug it into my Mac, and it happily chugs along and reads all his data and lets me save it off to another drive. Thanks, Mac!
So I ran out of time yesterday and went back today with the SSD I got for the ditzy lady some months ago, thinking I would finally get my money for that. Well, not so much. The crappy PC wouldn't recognize it as being plugged in.
Plug in the old, busted drive: it's recognized.
Same cables. Plug in SSD: Not there.
Of course this fact was masked because the XP setup wasn't recognizing his SATA ports, so I had to bust out an actual floppy disk to make him a setup boot disk. Of course the floppy drive in his machine was crap, and had to pull one from a machine that was just sitting there, more time wasted.
So I realize this machine may be a lost cause, what's with the machine currently holding up your "open" sign, mr sir? Let's try it! It's faster, has twice the RAM, and look, it recognized the SSD. We're in business.
Except for a little message
"Chassis Intrusion. Fatal Error."
Uum, okay? I took the cover off. Sue me. Well, it won't boot, it just stops stone dead at that message. Really motherboard manufacture? You're going to kill a perfectly good circuit board when some sensor that doesn't even exist tells you the case was opened? How does that help anyone? (The case of course has no sensor so it can't know if the thing is sitting on bench or in a case or out in space, hurtling towards the sun where it belongs.)
I try resetting the CMOS. I look in the manual (so helpful). I try various jumper settings (hate you PCs)
No. Love. Or Friendship. Or Tolerance. To be found. Perhaps the Elements of Harmony? Could turn it into stone for me?
Left there at 3:30, I had arrived at 12:00. So I have to order him another drive for his crappy system so it'll recognize it, as I can't figure out why it can't see this SSD.
It's rather ironic, in a way. The system that can see it, won't boot. The system that can boot, won't see it.
And the drive obviously works, why won't this specific PC not see it there?
Why did both his laptops suddenly decide he was running pirated XP versions a day apart? Why does the one laptop have such a sucky trackpad? Why do the birds go on singing? Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Otherwise today I dropped off the laptop so I collected my $40 from last week, and the mortgage place finally ditched their crappy DSL connection, but didn't know how to put their router on DHCP rather then Static IP Address, so I had to go do that for them. A one minute job.
Oh yeah, and I usually check my phone messages before I leave, because I had one, but today I didn't. Of course it was 11:00 guy that I got there early, figuring I would wait an hour. My cell phone rang, but it wasn't Sean so I figured "must be a wrong number" so I sat for ten minutes. Then I thought, wait, doesn't mr guy have my cell phone number? So I checked and it was him. "Oh, I need to reschedule for 12:00."
So I drove all the way back home for an hour and fifteen minutes, then back out there again! WWWEEEEEEEEE.
Yesterday I hooked up that blue ray player, did a cleanout, both 1/2 an hour of work, so I collected the same then as today. Despite the hours of work I actually did both of those days.
Two for tomorrow afternoon, oh and the account guy says I never transferred his contact list? That was like two months ago I set his new system up. Where's he been?
Last night I went through Sean's edits for book one. Now I have to start rewriting them to remove references to what happened in the past, on the off chance he ever writes the "beginning" books. So every character name has to change, all the things they talk about happening in the past has to change… across two books. Don't miss any!
I wonder if I should even bother, it's not like they're going to make me money even if I do publish them, so why not just leave them be, print copies for myself, and be done with it? Go back to playing video games or something?