A bad computer day

It is already bad enough that we're battling technology problems in a project at work, but it seems every bit of equipment that has a byte of data in it, decided to make my life more difficult today.

While my personal laptop is doing a scan for that virus I just can't seem to get rid of, now my work laptop is starting to have a life by itself.

I spend minutes just watching the small harddisk LED flicker, and I have no clue what it is actually doing. Because *I* am not doing anything. Just watching the darned harddisk activity.

I gathered it might be running out of diskspace (which in retrospect it is not), so start to clean up, but the laptop decided a 0.5 Gigabyte file can not be moved nor deleted. Cause? Unknown!

Meanwhile, I am waiting for a call from a friend on Skype, but find out he disappeared from my Skype account on my work laptop. So when he calls me, it is the second laptop that rings. Not the one I have the headset on.

After the Skype conversation, I see the second laptop decided it had done enough, and went into hibernate. For no reason I can see, as it was plugged into the wall socket..

Several restarts later, followed with just as many hibernates, I figure out that it is either on strike, or might be too hot - even though I am wearing a sweater.. Maybe try to put something underneath it? Need some air, baby?

That worked. Except that while starting up, all of the software that was running before the hibernate decided it has to re-build databases, restart indexing, and checking data consistency. And halfway through the process, it gets too hot again.

So, being obedient to technology, I persist in cleaning up files and making sure it has gigabytes and gigabytes of virtual memory space (why it needs that much, I don't know as I don't run that many programmes at the same time).

I decide to update some of the software I use, just in case. Big mistake. As it usually is.
The regular Apple update of Safari and Quicktime+iTunes. 100 Megabyte. 100! How on earth does anyone keep their software updated without access to cable or ADSL is a mystery to me...
Checking for Microsoft updates leaves me equally dazzled. I just upgraded all Microsoft software two days ago. And it keeps on finding new stuff. 15 new updates in two days...

Just not a good day for computers. But look at the bright side: at least I got this blog posted. And it was a glorious sunny day today! :-)

Picture courtesy Jineg