One lousy hard disk can ruin your day

It’s been an up and down week so far. Last weekend, my stereo system at home died. I think the problem is in my old Adcom integrated tuner-preamp, although I’m not 100 percent sure. Meanwhile, the whole stack of audio components and the speakers in three rooms are basically useless. Given the age of the unit, and the distance to any authorized repair center, I’m going to look into replacing it with a newer model when I have the money. Until then, we have MP3 players and headphones.

Tuesday morning was a rush. At 11, I started watching a streaming Silverlight feed of the inauguration on the Presidential Inauguration Committee site from one of my office computers, and following comments from friends on Facebook and Twitter. By 11:30, I wanted to view this event with other people, so I walked over to our local library and joined the inauguration-watching party. While CNN was annoying in treating the inauguration like a pop-up video, having people around made it more real for me. We applauded; we cried; we rejoiced.

Late Tuesday, I had a long call with a friend from high school who suspects he has a variant of the Poison Ivy trojan on his Windows Vista computer. From the diagnostics I had him run at PC Pitstop, and the various anti-virus and anti-spyware scans that he’s run, he probably doesn’t have the trojan, although I couldn’t rule it out completely. I left him with a list of other programs to try, along with a list of best practices for doing malware scans and cleanups, the most important of which is to boot to safe mode so that the removal will work.

This morning I came into the office to find the computer on which I do most of my e-mailing, writing, printing, and composing unable to boot. It complained of a missing or corrupted system file. Power-downs and reboots didn’t help. I was able to boot from a Windows XP Pro SP2 install DVD, but it couldn’t repair the problem, and after a while, it couldn’t even read the disk. Neither could Selkie Rescue. On a final try, Windows couldn’t even reformat the disk.

Poof! Well, I have at least two sets of backups on a networked disk server: I should be able to get my data files back, and probably all but a few of my old e-mails. It’s not a total disaster, but it did ruin my day.

That computer is five years old, and in December I started to go through the process of getting a replacement built, just in case. That process was interrupted by the failure of the 99-year-old toilet in the bathroom at home, which led us to secure an equity line of credit and start remodeling the bathroom. The remodeling job started right after New Year’s; today they’re installing the base of the new shower. I like to think of it as my contribution to jump-starting the economy rather than just another crushing debt. Meanwhile, we’re all sharing the children’s tiny bathroom.

What I was specifying for a new workstation was a quad-core tower with a late-model Nvidia graphics board capable of doing CUDA. The many interesting discussions about such systems that followed the posting left me with an open mind about what to get.

This morning’s disk failure sent me off to Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale to look for a replacement tower along the same general lines as the one I would have had built had I been able to last month. I found an HP model with all that and 8GB of RAM for about $760 after the 10 percent sale discount. I tried to buy one on the spot from the knot of computer department salesmen and techies standing around talking about their as-yet-unsuccessful job searches, but — this is classic Circuit City — they didn’t have one in the store to sell me. Supposedly, there are six of them on a truck headed to the store. Perhaps I’ll try again tomorrow — or perhaps I’ll shop the stores that will still be in business in April to see if I can get something similar without paying too much more, since even with the discount Circuit City’s prices didn’t look all that great.

Meanwhile, I’m doing most of my work on the computer I previously reserved for programming and software testing. Later this week, with any luck, I’ll be able to write up the great interview I had last Friday with Andy Keane of Nvidia. Stay tuned.