Thursday, March 09, 2006

No Disclaimers, Please and Sometimes My Work PC Sucks

It seems that some Conservative Christians are asking that a disclaimer be made BEFORE the showing of "The DaVinci Code". The people asking for this state it will confuse people who are on the fence about Christianity. I say that the disclaimer idea is wrong. This gives Christians an EXCELLENT chance to evangelize to those who saw the movie and have questions. I am not the only one who thinks that. Scott Wilder, Christian talk show host, agrees. If a disclaimer is issued, this could start a new era of censorship. While I realize the need to shield children from harmful content, I believe adults need to make their own decisions.

JMHO / YMMV

There was a mandatory update to the Windows operating environment at work 2 days ago. I always follow the rules when updates are concerned. I accepted the update and rebooted as instructed. The PC booted very slowly and after being on 8 hours or so, it bluescreens with an error message regarding new hardware (which there is none) and atapi.sys . I ignored it since I have never had issues with my work PC. I reboot and try again. It runs, but runs very slow. It is near the end of my day so I do not worry. I go home and eat a quiet dinner with my beautiful wife. When dinner is done and the dishes are washed, I try to boot my work PC. It boots. I run some diagnostics and cannot find anything wrong. The only software that has been installed is the updates from work and a little HDD utility from Panterasoft. I was curious on how much life I had left on the HD, since there is a history of failures on this model laptop. It boots OK, but slow. I shut it down and walk the dogs with my wife.

The next day I get to work and my PC takes about 7 minutes to boot. It normally takes less than a minute. It runs OK most of the day, but I still call our official IT to lodge a concern. The polite, but mostly helpless agent (must have been new, like me :)) told me he would let the OS team know. Later that day about 8 hours into my day, the PC crashes and will not boot again. I decide to use the older box and Citrix in from the customers environment. It is slow and drop frequently, but it is better than nothing.

One of the guys I know who does PC support stated that my problem may be software (Windows) instead of hardware. The diagnostics say the hard drive is fine. So I ran the tool he suggested (Sysinternals "NTFS ChkDsk") and tried to boot again. Nothing. I drove home and tried to boot the PC before I went to our care group and I got another error regarding "partmgr.sys". I have not looked up these errors yet to see what they really mean. A little later I tried to boot again and got an "unmountable boot device error". Ack! I was thinking the boot sector was trashed, but I got to work and after two failed boot attempts, the PC is running. The fan is not (and it should -- I have it set to run all the time) and the temp is a bit warm (46 degrees C.) but it is running. Part of the problem may be heat. This PC has a tendency to run warm. I have done all I can to keep it cool, but it still runs mid 40's C. Maybe there are other tools I can run...

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