AT HOME!!
Well, got fed up, after spending a lot of time trolling support sites and all said that if defrag takes longer than a couple of hours it's not going to complete at all, and besides, you need at least 10 percent free on the hard drive and it also helps to have ample memory. The suggestion was that, because of all the things that can interrupt defragging, it's best to do it while booted in safe mode, which perhaps I'll do one of these days.

So, with heart holding its breath, I powered down the computer, then confessed all my sins to the computer gods before powering it up again. It detected new hardware, then went back into defrag mode. So I powered it down again, and this time it came back up.

And this time I IMMEDIATELY did a full system backup before going online or anything. Had been unsure whether the previous backup was any good, since (why I didn't sleep for 8 days) the system had crashed while it was backing up last time -- oh, I guess I forgot to tell you that part of the story.

Anyway, will send this thing back when I'm good and ready -- have so much to do over the next few weeks, and absolutely MUST get back to a post-election world. Have no desire to do another mano a mano session with Dell support. I can't imagine how someone who is clueless about computers can get through something like this. The first thing they always want to do is reformat your hard drive and reinstall the operating system and all your software. Yeah. Like that's going to happen. My voice is hoarse from shrieking that this is not an option, and I KNEW it was not the software and drivers that was causing the screen to go scotch plaid and I knew it wasn't a virus, since I'd done a full scan the morning of the incident, and the thing has not once in five years had virus protection and firewall turned off or left unupdated. So there.

One nice thing -- they replaced the keyboard without me even asking them to -- the type had been worn off the e, t, s, and the arrow keys. This new keyboard is actually a whole lot nicer -- really good touch and snap. The keys are separated a little more, tho maybe each one is a tiny bit smaller. I had been not typing the "a" with my pinkie on the old keyboard because it had started sticking a little and poor old pinkie wasn't strong enough or patient enough for that shit. Maybe will train it back again now -- maybe not. If I have to go get a temp Kelly Girl job, they probably don't care whether I type funny or not.
- posted by Cynthia @ 6:31 PM | | | Link |