Scary. The message read” Diskette drive 0 seek failure” followed by “no bootable partition in table”. And that was it. No boot. No nothing. F12 got nowhere. F2 got nowhere and F1 got nowhere. Shut down 12 or 15 times. No boot.
So I went out and bought a new Dell multichannel processor, 750 gig HD, 6 gig ram, wireless internet, white sidewalls and skirts. Cheap too. Got home and tried the old one one more time: The frigger (see earlier essay) booted. Good. I had a nice chat with Deepthi Shankar at Norton and now can transfer NAV2010 to new computer.
God, I hate these things sometimes. I hate to be completely at the mercy of some GD processor or, even worse, hard drive. Once I could fix anything that broke on a car. Now there is so much electronic crap you need a computer lab to figure out what happened. Even washing machines and toasters have “microprocessors” instead of relays and switches. Remember the days when there were appliance repair shops that could actually repair a toaster cheaper than a new one cost? No, you young’ins wouldn’t. Crap.
I can’t wait to get my new Dell up and running. This one only has 40 gigs of memory and I have almost 18 gigs of free space left. Anyone want to buy a few gigs of memory?
Image: backupshare.com/main/data-backup.html
So I went out and bought a new Dell multichannel processor, 750 gig HD, 6 gig ram, wireless internet, white sidewalls and skirts. Cheap too. Got home and tried the old one one more time: The frigger (see earlier essay) booted. Good. I had a nice chat with Deepthi Shankar at Norton and now can transfer NAV2010 to new computer.
God, I hate these things sometimes. I hate to be completely at the mercy of some GD processor or, even worse, hard drive. Once I could fix anything that broke on a car. Now there is so much electronic crap you need a computer lab to figure out what happened. Even washing machines and toasters have “microprocessors” instead of relays and switches. Remember the days when there were appliance repair shops that could actually repair a toaster cheaper than a new one cost? No, you young’ins wouldn’t. Crap.
I can’t wait to get my new Dell up and running. This one only has 40 gigs of memory and I have almost 18 gigs of free space left. Anyone want to buy a few gigs of memory?
Image: backupshare.com/main/data-backup.html
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1 comment:
Economy of scale on overdrive. Somewhere along the line, our friends in manufacturing did the math and discovered that the real money is in new sales, not parts. As long as material, energy, and transportation costs are low, it's more cost effective from a production standpoint to replace, not repair. And to manufacture the replacement on the other side of the globe.
However, despite the claims of my tea party friends, a closed system means that supplies of material and (cheap and easy) energy are finite. It all runs out, eventually. So, double the cost of materials and triple the cost of energy and transport, and I think you'll see a "culture of repair" make a comeback -- at least for certain types of goods. Not computers and electronics, though... too much compression, and too many parts that zoom out of production too quickly. I suspect that computers will become more durable, rather than more fixable. (See the US$35 computers being designed for schools in India: shock-resistant, tolerant of heat and humidity, and very energy efficient so they can run off of marginal solar generators.)
You just have to hold on for the tipping point.
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