CK's blog

and it only cost me 50 bucks!

When I got up this morning, I wasn't ready for the day that was about to hit me.

It began when I pushed the power button on my computer. It started to spin up from being on standby last night, then it decided it wanted to go back to sleep... not so good. After a couple more tries and unplugging it and plugging it back in, I decided something was definitely wrong. I opened up the case and started unplugging things that could be a problem. When I unplugged my hard drive, it booted fine. "Great." I thought, my hard drive is dead. "Well, time to go to school."

I was pretty down about the prospect of having lost a year's worth of data. At least it wasn't all of it though. When I got my new hard drive (200GB) and copied my files off the old one (40GB) I left everyone on there "just in case." Fortunately, I had brought the drive down to SLO with me a couple weeks ago when I went back to San Jose for the weekend.

While I was eating lunch, I got a call on my cell. I'm already over my minutes for this month and still have like a week left on this bill. I looked at the number and noticed it was an on-campus number. Turns out it's the bookstore- the iPod I ordered just came in. What a kick in the nuts this felt like. I just got this thing I can store all my music and even back up my documents to, and I have no computer to hook it up to.

Once it came time to head home, I waited for the bus, reading the iPod user's guide like 5 times, silly me, I didn't realize it had games on it! I got on the bus and sat there for a few minutes. Then I remembered that bus #4 also goes back to the stop I get off at and gets there faster, so I hopped off the bus to get on that one. There were no other busses there. I went to look at the schedule and suddenly the bus I was on (and my only ride home for the next half-hour) closed its doors and took off. I ran after it for a few seconds, but the driver didn't seem to see me.

Great. No computer, no ride home, no cell phone minutes, and I have an iPod with no music. I decided to really just wallow in the crappyness of life and walk from campus to the bus stop where I left my car (Johnson & California). By the time I finially make it back there, I am so tired and frustrated that I can't see how my day can get much worse.

I arrive home and begrudgingly start to put my old 40GB hard drive into my computer to start it up, at least I'll be able to use it and have all the music I had as of last year. I push the power button. It starts to start up, then back to sleep. My computer is narcoleptic!!! At this point, I'm a bit confused, but also a bit relieved- this means it's not my hard drive that's broke, it's something else. At this point I am thankful- hardware can be replaced easily, data and software is not so easy, especially when you download a lot of it and don't back it up. = o

I took my 200GB hard drive over to work and Jim let me use this cool device that allows you to plug any IDE hard drive into a usb port. The cool thing is it's just two little adapters, data and power. I plug it in and pray. To my amazement, it spins up and there is all my data! Alive and well. At this point I'm thinking "OK, back up everything" so I copy my "My Documents" folder to my work laptop just in case. After a few minutes I realize that it looks like the drive is working just fine. Once the copy finishes I head home.

I got back and Matt really wanted to see how the iPod worked, so I connected my hard drive to Kevin's laptop with those cool connectors from work and set the iPod up on it. It works really nicely- my day seems to be getting better.

At this point I'm thinking the motherboard is messed up, because connecting drives seems to screw things up. This means I will have to buy a new motherboard, processor, and memory- several hundred dollars that I was actually planning to spend soon on the same thing, as it's about time for an upgrade. I figured, well, I guess this kinda forces me to upgrade.

I do a little test though, I plug my hard drive and CD drives into the power but NOT the data. This way, they will power up, but they aren't connected to the motherboard. It starts to spin up, then dies. Aha- a power supply problem! As bas as this sounds, it is the cheapest, easiest fix for a computer. You buy a new one for 50 bucks or so, plug it in and turn it on. After a short trip to Best Buy (Chris didn't buy anything! Amazing!) I came back and put it in and amazingly enough, it worked!

So my computer is working fine- or so I think. Apparantely something I did reset the windows drivers for my soundcard and they are being bastards about reinstalling. I spent the next couple hours wrestling windows and soundcard drivers, but at last- it works!

All my iPod software is installed now on my computer and everything seems to be working wonderfully. I guess after 4 or 5 years my power supply had just had enough. Considering it was a cheapo one that came with the case I'm kinda suprised it lasted this long.

Current Music: The Postal Services - Give Up
Link of the Day: Gmail - Want an invite?
Random Picture: