Geek Update

This morning I acquired a throbbing Geekache!  Somehow my computer lost power during shutdown, despite having a Tripp-Lite battery backup.  The computer was updating Norton GoBack software settings at the time….a software program designed to allow you to “GoBack” to the last working configuration of Windows when a new software install screws something up.  To make a long story short, the untimely power outage resulted in a file error in the Norton GoBack software that prevented my computer from being able to boot back up;  it  just went into a critical failure do-loop that I couldn’t get out of.  It wouldn’t even let me enter the BIOS…it would just reboot back to the point of critical failure!  After 2 hours of troubleshooting, sweating, crying and driving myself to the edge of insanity by talking to a worthless, India-based, live chat technician from Symantec Corp, I was finally able to fix the problem on my own.  I ended up having to create a bootable CD to start the computer to a working DOS prompt and run a Symantec file to uninstall (from outside of windows) the Norton GoBack software.  What a piece of crap!  To think I paid for this headache!  It did to my PC what it was supposedly designed to protect against.  ARGH!

My successful troubleshoot and fix got me all fired up to go out and buy some new hardware upgrades!  I like to call this tech therapy…..pseudo-motrin for my throbbing Geekache.  So, I went out and purchased a new Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive to augment the existing 250GB drive in my Sony Vaio.  I haven’t decided if I will set up a RAID configuration, or just add it to the unit as a secondary logical drive (probably the latter since I haven’t read RAID for dummies yet).  I also purchsed a Kingston 1GB PC2-4200 533MHz DDR2 RAM module, bringing my system to an eye-watering 2GB of RAM. 

Now all I have left to do to feed my geek appetite is salvage various parts (video card/RAM) from Ben’s dead PC and another dead PC I have to upgrade Delaney’s PC to a more capable “game” machine. 

Oh, I almost forgot….I am about to throw my Tripp-Lite Battery Backup into someone’s pool…..there is definitely something wrong with it, as it has never fully charged to 100%, and it failed miserably in providing battery backup when it was supposed to!  It was the ultimate source of today’s throbbing Geekache!