Monday, April 6, 2009

When it rains, it pours.

No this isn't a post about the very late season winter weather we are having in Denver. This post is about the joys of PC ownership, and the lost weekend of restoring my computer.

This computer is the workhorse of the Centennial State Geocaching Podcast. All recording and editing happens on this machine. So any downtime is not good for our product.

The symptoms appeared almost all at once a few weeks ago. I lost the SD card reader, fingerprint reader, webcam and touch screen. After a few e-mail exchanges with HP customer support. It was determined that a restore to 'the original factory settings' was necessary to determine if there was a hardware failure.

I scheduled this past Saturday to perform this task. We were expecting a blizzard over the weekend, so this was a good indoor activity. The restore was going to erase all I had on the computer, so I performed a inventory of the software on the computer, insured that I still had access to the programs, and backed-up the documents folder to our home server.

Late in the morning, after a quick prayer, I executed the complete restore option. In short order, I had a 'brand new computer' with all the missing functions successfully restored. I spent the remaining day copying back the saved documents and installing most of the software. I shut down the computer that evening, feeling confident that all was well.

That was until Sunday afternoon. Upon bootup, the built-in wireless connection failed. After spending most of Sunday in correspondence with HP support (via a wired connection) we got nowhere. The driver to run the build in wireless would not install. I shut it down, defeated.

This morning, I stopped in the the Office Depot near the office and purchased a USB wireless adaptor. (Consider it mental health insurance.) Was on sale for $40 US. I just finished installing and now have wireless again.

I'm waiting to see if I get any further reply for HP. I expect to have them say I need to restore to original factory settings. If that happens, A executive carpet bomb will be happening.

There, I feel better...

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