The Toothpick’s Blog

Well… that’s not an entirely accurate statement.  First, "finally" isn’t the right word, because the underlying cause had been going on since the thing came out of warranty (funny how that works, isn’t it?).  Also, it didn’t really "kick it."

It started about… oh, say beginning of this year.  I have no idea really, but that sounds about right.  Anyway, I’d have it off, or in hibernation, and it would shut down entirely.  As in I couldn’t turn it on.  At all.  The power button didn’t work, the little lock switch next to it wasn’t next to the little lock, the battery and power cable were both properly connected, and the charging light wasn’t lit when plugged in.  The first time it happened, I just waited.  I used my old laptop (the one who’s screen broke. I just propped it up on something).  Anyway, it eventually started working again, and everything was fine.  For a while.  Then it happened again.  And this time, I waited for a couple days.  And it still didn’t work.  I contacted Gateway, and they sent me back a suggestion to send it in to Gateway to be fixed.  No thanks.  They also gave me an 8 step process for taking out and reinserting the memory, which might fix the problem.  It did.  Temporarily.  Then it happened again.  And I repeated it.  And it kept working.  Then I started getting lazy, and I forgot to detach the battery one time (which was incredibly stupid of me, I could have shocked myself…), and it didn’t work.  So I did it again, taking out the battery, and it worked.  Some time later, I forgot to unplug the power cable from it.  It didn’t work.  With power cord: doesn’t work.  Without power cord: works.  With battery: doesn’t work.  Without battery: does work.  Seem like a pattern?  Finally, one day, I decided to try just taking out the battery and power cord, waiting a couple seconds, and reinserting each.  And, sure enough, it starts working again.

And so I finally figured out that all I had to do was remove the battery and power cord, and then put both back in.  Which was good, because it started happening more and more frequently.  Whenever I leaned on the area of the hard drive a little too hard, the whole thing would crash.  I was annoyed, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

One day, I was a bit pissed at my computer, because it was lagging more than I had ever seen it lag before.  I couldn’t even get to the restart button.  So I did it the fast and easy way.  I whacked the area above the hard drive, and it crashed.  But when I started it up again, it was in pretty bad shape.  Explorer took forever to load, and when it did, almost every program was slower than it ever had been.  So I restarted it (I could at least get to the button this time), and it shut down and powered back on.  I signed in, and was greeted with a blank, blue screen.  Then it restarted.  and the same thing happened.  This time, it failed to boot.  And it failed to boot in safe mode.  So I booted the Vista DVD and selected "Repair."  It couldn’t find the Windows installation.  So I got to the main menu, and it couldn’t find any system restore points.  I clicked "Detect and Repair," in the hopes that it might find something, and it did.  And it repaired it.  I booted the computer, and the same thing happens.  I repeated the boot from DVD, and this time it detects the Vista installation.  "Repairs Unsuccessful."  I try again.  This time it said it worked.  Reboot.  It failed to boot normally, so I tried in safe mode.  And it works.  I sign in, and it works.  Barely.  As soon as I try to open something, Explorer crashes.  And it won’t recover.  I hold the power button (because I couldn’t get there in Explorer), and it boots in safe mode. Repeat.  The third or fourth time, I get a chance to press the "restart" button in Windows.  It shuts down, and the next time it starts, there’s a message: "WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent."  Fuck.

So, when backing up my hard drive, I found a number of files that were unreadable (corrupted).  Which leads me to think that when I hit it, either the disk head scratched the surface (which isn’t theoretically possible, seeing as it’s designed not to), or files were open, and Windows hadn’t finished writing to them (which isn’t likely, cause the thing’s done the same thing about a hundred times without this happening once).

So, in conclusion…  My hard drive is partially corrupted, and my laptop is the biggest reason.  Which makes it easier to convince my parents to get me a new one (plus the fact that it’s been spiraling downhill for the year it’s been out of warranty…).  And, at least most of my data isn’t corrupted, so I’ll just be able to transfer it over when I do get a new computer.  Of course, the laptop isn’t completely unusable, and I do have my old hard drive…  And as long as I’m not using it regularly…  What I’m planning to do with it is set up Web Server 2008 on it, and tuck it away somewhere where it won’t get hurt.  I can then run my SharePoint site off of that, instead of a 10 year old machine with a 20 GB hard drive and 256 MB of ram.  That’ll make everything a whole lot easier…

god that was long…