Technology Bites…

The Windows computers in our house are out to get me.

We bought new Macs back at Christmas, and two weeks ago our desktop computer decided to freak out in response. Yes, I am convinced that the computers know and are revolting because we have betrayed them. The main thing I used that computer as was a print server, and it couldn’t see the network – so I couldn’t print. Fortunately, thanks to the holidays, I didn’t have many meetings at the time so I didn’t need printed documents. However, I have a meeting tomorrow, a meeting on Monday, maybe another meeting this weekend, and you can see that I need to print. Mike determined the day that it stopped working that it was the video card, and he first tried using one that we had here to fix it. That didn’t work, so we went to Fry’s tonight and got a new card, and he put it in the machine. All is well again with Floyd as of this evening. (Yes, Mike has named the computers. Muppet names. All of them have Muppet related names. My old laptop was Cookie Monster. Teehee!)

Then last night I was exporting close to 300 photos from Lightroom on the old Dell laptop. Since it was processing so much, I decided to get to work on finally getting everything migrated to the Mac so that I could pass the Dell on to Jason. It wasn’t like I’m getting rid of it completely – and yet it still decided to quit on me too! 201 photos into the export, it just stopped. No more cursor for the mouse, no response to anything I tried. I couldn’t even do a ctrl-alt-del to turn it off. It was late, I was tired, and I finally just turned it off.

This morning, I needed to get the DVD of the photos burned, so I tried to turn it on so I could do that before I headed off to Twisted Yarns to knit.

It wouldn’t come on.

Press button, lights blink, and then they go off and the fan turns off and the machine is silent.

Press button again. Then decide to unplug all external drives in case that is the problem, and try again. Still nothing. Call Mike into the room to see if he has an idea – or to just point and gasp and point while flailing my arms at him, because I knew deep down he wasn’t going to be able to do anything. And I was right. He tried taking out the battery and powering it up with just the power cord, but that didn’t work either.

I finally just had to leave the house and retreat to knit. Two sticks and some wool, and I was much happier. Meanwhile, while I was gone, he was awesome as always and contacted Dell Tech Support. The laptop is just over a year old, and has 610 days left on its warranty. They poked and prodded at it, and in the end they determined that it was the motherboard that has gone bad. We had two options; Dell could send us a box and we could send them the laptop to fix, or they could send us a new motherboard and he could install it. We chose to have them send us the motherboard. Hopefully, that will do the trick and in a few days Jason will be up and running on the Dell.

I’m *so* glad that I was in the midst of moving to the new machine – I had everything that I needed already backed up to external drives. I might be missing some of my Lightroom presets, but if that is the worst of it I am pretty happy.

Meanwhile, this was the swift kick in the arse that I needed to get me to migrate FAST over to the Mac. Lightroom is now installed, and I should have Photoshop running by the end of the weekend. Since Floyd is back up, I can print for my meeting tomorrow. I want to do test prints before I print client orders, so I’ll send those off shortly.

I guess there is nothing like being thrown into the deep end to force you to learn something new!