When God and Microsoft Join Forces... · 9:35pm April 11th
So. Yeah.
My desktop got bricked.
It happened sometime on… Tuesday night? Wednesday morning? I don’t know. I turn the desktop off every night before bed because I grew up in an age when they hammered it into your head that it was what was best for your computer. Tuesday night when I go to do so, I get an option to “Update and shutdown”, which is a pretty common thing and I do it every time it pops up.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the power goes out. Big storm and all that.
When I get home from the office (because no power at home means I gotta work there, yuck) and try to turn on the desktop? Well, it does come on, but only for long enough to cry out “Goodbye cruel world!” and go back to sleep.
More specifically, it gives me two separate errors. The first warning tells me that “a device is disconnected or damaged”. The second one tells me that a “critical file is missing and needs to be re-installed”. For the second, it tells me very clearly that if I don’t have an installation medium that isn’t the internet then I’m screwed. Which means I am, undeniably, screwed. Was it the power outage and my PC not being sufficiently protected despite being plugged into a protector, or did the Microsoft update throw a wrench in the works? I give it 30/35 odds. The remainder goes to "both".
So now I’m sitting here using my backup laptop, the one so puny that for the first hour on startup it gives me a five second lag between what I’m typing and when it appears on the screen. Obviously, I avoid using this thing most of the time, but when needs must…
There’s some good elements to this. I’ve been planning for the past few months to bring the desktop in and upgrade its processor, which is the only thing original to the machine from when I first bought it some eight years ago. Now I can bring it in and get that done at the same time as the repair. Even better; I just paid off my car last month and got my annual bonus too, so of all times this could happen, now isn’t so bad. Plus I was planning to go visit my parents and niece this weekend, so it’s not like I was going to be on the desktop during that time regardless.
I took my desktop in to a local computer repair/customization shop I've come to trust. The guy I spoke to said that my options are either: get a fix from Microsoft using some sort of point system they have and which I may or may not have, or do a complete re-install. I won't know which it has to be until tomorrow, but if it ends up that second one then I'll lose all my programs on the PC and have to re-install every last one. Fun. He also said that my processor is so old that I'll have to do a complete "engine replacement": new motherboard, new memory, new processor, all at once. I'm confident I want to do this since, y'know, the compy's already there so I might as well, but I'm waving goodbye to that bonus.
Oh, almost forgot: no desktop means no Discord, so I won't be sharing Guppy Love with my prereaders this week like I originally thought.
That’s all I’ve got today. Not what I wanted to talk about, but fate had other plans. Tune in next week for another HiE, Vinyl Scratch’s body of music being harshly ridiculed, and a bunch of Rarities discussing their individual marefriends.
Oh, and, uh, somebody take this desktop destroyer off my hands...
Need some editing done? Working on a story and not sure how it’s shaping up? I’m now doing editing and critique commissions! Check here for more information and PM me if interested.
Oh geez louise, that bytes* to happen. I'll consider it minor blessings that it happened when you were planning an upgrade to one part (ha, "replacing individual parts, ain't that sophisticated", says the spirit who despite working in app development has only ever bought his own personal computers fully new
), and when you have a bonus you can afford to part with, even if one would prefer to keep it of course.
* This autocorrected from "bites", and I instantly knew it had to be kept and shared with the world.
Get a new hard drive, and install Windows on that so you can recover anything on the old one.
Oof. That sounds bad. I'm going to guess a combination of "was installing new stuff when blackout hit" combined with "surge" did some really bad things.
I guess the good news is you can make USB restore drives these days for just this event ... but they're usually computer specific, IE you have to prep one beforehand. Which .... yeah, doesn't help now.
Dude, that sucks.
oooh, gosh, thats not a fun experience ;-; i overheated my laptop in 2022 and nearly lost everything (learned my lesson abt backups, there), so i hope that u didnt lose anything important, i wouldnt wish that kind of stress on anyone
And since Windows 11 is coming out soon and MS will pull the plug on updating everything not current enough (even stuff like mine which has been faithfully plugging away for years), might as well proceed into the Century of the Fruitbat. (Did you have OneDrive turned on? If so, you may not lose anything but SAN points)
So, because you have a second, functional(ish) computer, you should be able to recover your OS. Find an empty thumb drive, plug that in, and then Create a Recovery Drive. Give it a few minutes, then you should have the tools to rebuild your OS on your desktop.
If you do want to go the upgrade route... you have a choice to make: AMD is doing an admirable job keeping their old AM4 platform alive. If you've got a Micro Center near you, you can snag a decent mobo, some good ram, and the best AM4 CPU for a cool $350. Or you can buy into the newer AM5 platform, which'll provide you with a better framework to pull a PC of Theseus. Again, bundles are your friend, you can pick up some good parts for $500.
I have enough problems in my life without you triggering guilt in moving from one PC to another. My sympathies though.
This is incredibly sad news, but if you were running the CPU in the pic, then it was time to upgrade a while ago. If you go all the way, you can get a 5th gen board which, only being a few years old, would last you quite a while. I upgraded from a 3rd gen board to a 4th gen board since i got the gen 3 for free from a friend of mine as we were all in a 'computer building' phase. I sincerely hope I don't run into any problems like yours because getting parts here in Japan is a nightmare.
As someone who has ruined his own installation of windows multiple times (read: tried to run sequential GPUs by different manufacturers during the big mining boom which is a stability headache) it might end up being a good thing in the long run to reinstall your stuff because you install some one off programs every now and again and forget they exist, taking up memory and bogging down your start up times. It's good to do every now and again.
D:
I really need to get mine into the new case before something like that happens, shiiiiiiii-
Oof, I know the pain, my PC recently bricked itself last month. Had a poor quality 1 TB drive that did run alright, up till it crapped itself and wiped everything on it, including the OS (Thankfully I didn't have any important documents on my PC, mainly just Steam games). And tech support couldn't fix it because Amazon screwed up the warranty by switching the original 256 GB drive with the aforementioned 1 TB drive, which counts as tampering in their eyes.
Thankfully I'm friends with a guy who does IT work, and he's gonna be replacing the busted drive with a shiny new 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD drive that was ordered last weekend and arrived this past Tuesday!
Jeeze, what a nightmare! (And not the good kind!)
I hope the recovery works well.
5776373
While I'm annoyed at having to use my laptop for the next few days, I do greatly appreciate the timing of it. I mean, it could have been during a review week!
5776377
There may not be anything wrong with the hard drives though.I suppose I could always have four of them; one can never have too much space. But alas, the PC's already at the shop.
5776380
I'm not so sure that's what happened? I mean, it doesn't usually take more than five minutes for one of those "update and shut down" updates to happen. I was in bed some twenty minutes after choosing the option and power was definitely still on then. However, the PC doesn't finish the update until I turn it back on. It could be that the power outage somehow messed up something even though the PC was shut down, like maybe some part of it was merely "sleeping" instead of genuinely off at the time.
But that's just a theory. A computer theory.
Enough people have brought up the concept of USB drives now that I can safely say I'm aware of them and will make one in the future, but for now...
5776382
I... don't think I will have? Yes, my software's gone, but that can all be re-downloaded, and the vast majority of my docs are on GDocs now. Come to think of it though, I did have freshly re-edited Word copies of The Gentle Nights: Audience of One, Bulletproof Heart, and most of my Foundations anthology on the desktop, for which I had planned to eventually do reprints, and one of Frequency which I wanted to do a print of someday. If my drives got corrupted than all that work is gone, unless they got backed up to my OneDrive, which I don't think they were.
5776383
I think I have OneDrive on, but I can't say for sure because I almost never actually access it.
5776385
I'm definitely doing the upgrade, because at this stage why not just get it over and done with? In that regard all this really did was push that up a month or two. I told the guys at the shop to send me a list of upgrade options and I'd pick whichever one looked best (and affordable) to me.
In truth, the laptop works fine once it's been running for a while and done all its background startup stuff. It's just very... small, as in I bought it expressly for having something to write on when not at home, so everything on it is (figuratively speaking) last year's tech. By comparison, the desktop is meant to be a gaming PC, so I try to make sure that when I upgrade I give it higher-end equipment.
I was unaware you could make a backup drive from an existing OS. I'll have to keep that in mind for next time.
5776391
My original intent was to find a picture of a PC in horseworld exploding. Alas, they are not as common as one might hope.
5776397
I'd definitely get a 5th gen if I can (and can afford it). Normally I'd do a bunch of research on potential processors and go in telling the guys exactly what I want, but this sort of came at me from nowhere and my first instinct was "fix it now!". I at least had the foresight to tell them to send me a list of options to choose from, so I can pick the best I can of what is available.
Pretty sure I was at that stage anyway. My desktop had 3 TB of hard drive space and I had more than half of it used up. That sure as Tartarus isn't due to my horsepicture collection.
5776419
My desktop is large compared to most, but even so it's got so much stuff in it that I couldn't possibly fit anything else. It's so tight in there the GPU's fans are rubbing up against some of the wires. I told them to get me a bigger case while they were at it.
5776433
I made the switch from mechanical to SSD a couple years ago with this desktop. The difference is amazing, you'll love it.
5776447
Thanks, me too!
Sheesh. No fun at all. It's been a long time since I used Windows (other than when forced to) but Microsoft updates were always the bane of my life. I hope you can sort things out as quickly as possible!