Bohemia Bunny

Things Fall Apart

November 6th, 2007 by lynnylchan under My Life

My possessions seem to be falling apart, being damaged, not working… general state of disrepair, or did someone cast the evil eye on me?

My Nintendo DS started it with its hairline fracture. Still, no functional damage, everything working fine.

One of my pets developed a tumour quite suddenly. It doesn’t seem to be affecting her, but we’re monitoring the situation. Worrying, and also quite costly, but she’s still alive and living well.

On Saturday, I scheduled a disk check for my laptop. On Sunday, I started up the machine and it spent the next 2 hours checking my hard drive. Verdict: Everything fine. It started to boot up, and then suddenly -

Error code c000021a Unknown Stop Error.

You tell me what that means, Google!

Google said it means not-very-bad-thing to very-very-bad-thing. It seemed fixable. Never mind, a quick press of the power button will soon put things right.

It put things wrong. Now there was a horrible, hollow, clack-clack-clack sound coming from the side of the machine. It requested a bootup from a floppy disk, a cd-rom - anything but my hard drive. I tried a dozen more times, nothing worked. Thanks! There goes my entire day.

Monday morning, I took it down to the Acer service centre. Thank God for small mercies, it’s not terribly far from NUS. The dude wrote off my hard drive as a failure and quoted me 200 bucks, not including GST, for new parts and labour. Couldn’t he boot up from something else and try to recover my data, because I had a presentation due in 2 days? Nope, all gone.

I sat in the waiting area and numbed my pain with Rune Factory. Less than an hour later, I was notified that it was ready for pickup. The receipt said they’d put in an 80GB drive, which is a slight improvement on my previous 60GB one - for $150 bucks.

What! I bought my external HDD for that price, and double the capacity! Mine’s 2.5″ too! Okay, so I bought an IDE drive. A quick poke through “My Computer” says the new one’s an IDE drive too. So what gives, Acer? You overcharge customers now? Seeing how my warranty had already expired, I should just have lugged it down to Sim Lim Square and got the job done for less. I really don’t see any reason why it should have cost that much - it just doesn’t seem to make sense. I will acknowledge that they may charge a premium because of warehousing costs and all that, but $150 is just too much - and the label on the packaging said the drive was made in October 2007, and we all know how much hard drives cost back then. If I’d been using my brain then, I’d have brought the issue up. As it was, I was just reeling from the shock of losing all my data.

Backups saved me from huddling in the corner and whimpering like a baby. Apart from when I got my very first laptop back in 2002, I have never had to start from scratch with a computer. When I got this Acer, I just transferred everything over from the previous one. It’s reassuring to have your own wallpaper and avatar instead of the bland default XP meadow. It’s like moving house, really. You want some familiarity to ease the transition. And of course, the prospect of having to rebuild my media library, not to mention the loss of videos and photos, would probably just devastate me. So yes, backups are the best. Nevertheless, when solid-state drives become mainstream, such problems will be a thing of the past. I am saving up my money in anticipation of the day that I can spend it all on a new laptop with SSD!

Unfortunately I hadn’t backed up my school files since the beginning of term, and more importantly I hadn’t made a duplicate of my presentation by emailing it to myself or something. Sunday and Monday had been set aside for doing the presentation, so not only did I lose that working time, I actually went into negative figures because I had to redo my work. That’s even worse than if I had just slacked those 2 days away. I spent most of Monday reinstalling programs and restoring my media files, as well as tweaking some settings here and there.

I lost my installation of Office 2003, so I have to use OpenOffice now. Great, now I get to rush a presentation while learning the ropes of a new program! Lovely! My plans for Tuesday have been shot to bits - I’m skipping formal dinner and the hall bash to stay in and do work. I’m already skipping class, but that’s because I don’t feel motivated enough to attend.

At the rate I’m going, the next thing to fall apart will be me.