Time To Change… I guess

This post was originally going to be titled “I just want to win”, because that is how I’m starting to feel. I just can’t win.

So I’m on like day 12 of 7:45 AM or earlier phone calls. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except you must realize that I’m a person that works til 2 or 3 in the morning when I get on a programming roll. I’m also used to waking up at 9:30 AM, without an alarm… So these 7AM wake up calls, if they continue, will probably shift my wake up time to earlier… That’s good I guess, right?

On top of that, 7:00 AM calls generally mean something seriously wrong with someone’s life (computer). So far, it’s included:

• Media Server being down
• Email being partially down (twice)
• Missing Printers
• A computer that wouldn’t turn on
• Someone just calling because they can
• About a dozen or so not so important calls.

All that said, I feel that it just keeps adding up as well. Take this morning for example… I woke up to find that the power had flashed last night most likely due to some stray lightning. Both of my computers are set to stay off when this happens to prevent them from going into power cycle mode. In any case, I crawled out of bed to a 7:15 phone call where all the person would have needed to do was reboot. I walked over to power up my computer because I was expecting some emails this morning from another website that just went live.

I then proceeded to the bathroom for my morning routine.

When I got back, the computer wasn’t at the desktop. It was sitting at the screen telling me that it had just failed to boot and so it was going to try again. I let it try one more time to find out that something went corrupt on on the system.

I spent about 3 hours trying to solve the problem, using the Vista Startup Recovery tool, attempting to boot into safe mode, google… I probably could have got it running if I put another 12 hours into it, but I said screw this, I’ll just reformat.

So I did, and I must admit, thanks to how vista does it, this has been one of the fastest get up and running routines I’ve had in awhile. I didn’t actually format my drive, so what it did is it moved my windows folder, my programs folder, and my users folder into a “windows.old” folder. Basically that allowed me to install windows with all my drivers (because it could find them on the old copy). It’s also made getting some of my settings back pretty easy. In fact, I had everything minus a few programs by 1:00pm today.

I’ve also made some program changes, meaning I’m trying other tools in place of the ones I’m used to using. I’ll blog about them later though… For now, there is work to be done!