End of Xmas For Another Year

And this is how xmas ends, not with a bang but with a pile of proto-mulch at the curb, awaiting collection by the county.

At the curb, 2007-01-09

It's all over for another year. Thank god.

End of Xmas For Another Year

And this is how xmas ends, not with a bang but with a pile of proto-mulch at the curb, awaiting collection by the county.

At the curb, 2007-01-09

It's all over for another year. Thank god.

House Calls

It's been a long time since I've done a geek house call. I used to freelance among a small circle of clientele but it took a huge amount of time and my full-time job pays vastly better than what I made as a freelancer. Still, I have a couple of clients I help out from time to time. This was one of those times, sort of.

Tracie, my fabulous accountant, sometimes calls if her computers are misbehaving. This time, she called because her ex-husband's computer was misbehaving. OK, no problem... Tracie has saved me a bundle on tax preparation in the past so I was happy to help out her dear ones.

The machine in question was a 1.6 GHz HP Athlon K6 machine, 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB drive with CD-ROM and DVD drives, all running Windows XP SP2, home edition. The machine would start booting but would crap out within a few seconds with "Bad or corrupted ntfs.sys" message. The XP install CD was no help with repairing the boot drive: setupdd would crap out with "error 7," whatever that is.

Because the boot partitions were NTFS rather than an older FAT16 or FAT32, it took some effort to boot the machine in such a way that I could examine the boot disk. A combination of a Win98 boot diskette and ntfs4dos shareware finally allowed me to replace the ntfs.sys file but there was no change. After running a few more tests, I ultimately tried removing the RAM DIMMs, one at a time. Sure enough, the machine was actually experiencing a memory error, not a file system or disk issue.

Leaving the faulty DIMM out of the machine allowed it to boot with 256 MB. Lewis will work with the machine in its reduced memory mode for a while to see if the performance is tolerable. If not, we'll get a replacement DIMM; if so, I'll consider the issue closed.

Since I owe Tracie for past help, I charged him only $20 for a couple of hours of my time & travel, a steep discount from my usual rate. Nevertheless, he included an additional tip of $15, bless him. Lunch for the coming week is now paid for.

If nothing else, it was a reminder of how much I really hate Windows and all that it represents. There's no reason the OS couldn't have reported a more explicit error; better diagnostics could have saved us all a considerable amount of effort. Curse you, Bill Gates. Bastards.

House Calls

It's been a long time since I've done a geek house call. I used to freelance among a small circle of clientele but it took a huge amount of time and my full-time job pays vastly better than what I made as a freelancer. Still, I have a couple of clients I help out from time to time. This was one of those times, sort of.

Tracie, my fabulous accountant, sometimes calls if her computers are misbehaving. This time, she called because her ex-husband's computer was misbehaving. OK, no problem... Tracie has saved me a bundle on tax preparation in the past so I was happy to help out her dear ones.

The machine in question was a 1.6 GHz HP Athlon K6 machine, 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB drive with CD-ROM and DVD drives, all running Windows XP SP2, home edition. The machine would start booting but would crap out within a few seconds with "Bad or corrupted ntfs.sys" message. The XP install CD was no help with repairing the boot drive: setupdd would crap out with "error 7," whatever that is.

Because the boot partitions were NTFS rather than an older FAT16 or FAT32, it took some effort to boot the machine in such a way that I could examine the boot disk. A combination of a Win98 boot diskette and ntfs4dos shareware finally allowed me to replace the ntfs.sys file but there was no change. After running a few more tests, I ultimately tried removing the RAM DIMMs, one at a time. Sure enough, the machine was actually experiencing a memory error, not a file system or disk issue.

Leaving the faulty DIMM out of the machine allowed it to boot with 256 MB. Lewis will work with the machine in its reduced memory mode for a while to see if the performance is tolerable. If not, we'll get a replacement DIMM; if so, I'll consider the issue closed.

Since I owe Tracie for past help, I charged him only $20 for a couple of hours of my time & travel, a steep discount from my usual rate. Nevertheless, he included an additional tip of $15, bless him. Lunch for the coming week is now paid for.

If nothing else, it was a reminder of how much I really hate Windows and all that it represents. There's no reason the OS couldn't have reported a more explicit error; better diagnostics could have saved us all a considerable amount of effort. Curse you, Bill Gates. Bastards.