computers

Microsoft, the evil empire, has struck back at my efforts to keep my computers running. I have a desktop and a laptop running Windows 10, and both have tried to update to the newest, greatest iteration of Windows, cleverly named 1903, and both crashed and burned due to bugs in the installation software. Microsoft support people actually spent a couple of hours on the phone with me, but they couldn’t solve the problem (though they did acknowledge that there were a lot of people having problems).

I’m back in business, though, with the older version of Windows, thanks to full disk image backups I’d run to external hard drives. Not quite as recently as I’d wished, but recently enough.

If you have a major Windows update coming, do yourself a big favor and get yourself a fat external drive if you don’t already have one, and back up your whole system before the update! You’ll be glad you did.

Even if the emperor isn’t.

It’s been a month since my Asus laptop, Antares, died from motherboard failure—a year to the day after I purchased it. After much nudging, pleading, and cajoling on my part, Asus agreed to take it back for warranty repair. It came back this week, running again, but with Windows restored to a factory-new condition. Good(-ish)! I run a lot of software, and that means a week of reinstalling everything… unless… unless I can restore it from backup.

Before I sent it in, I’d pulled the hard drive and made a disk-image backup using Aomei free backup software, and a second backup using Paragon backup software, just in case. You can’t be too careful.

So I plug in the backup drive, run Aomei, and tell it to restore the drive from my backup. What could go wrong? Runnnn… brrrrrrrrr…boom, restart computer, and we’re back to Feb. 8. Right?

Restart computer. Boom. “Boot device not found.” Thud.

“It’s still dead, Jim.”

Two days later, and I’m still running different permutations of the restore, using a boot thumbdrive that Aomei created for me.  (Paragon created one, too, but it didn’t boot.) No response from an email to tech support.  And then, on the user forum, an admin casually notes that my backup procedure was flawed—can’t backup the system files from a drive in a USB enclosure. Oh, shirt.

As a temporary diversion, I spend an hour playing Mr. Fixit, replacing the faulty inlet valve in our dishwasher. At least that works!

I have more backups, though, right? Surely I do. Here’s one from November.  This is my last hope. I run it. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr… (it’s on a different backup drive, a slower one). Two hours later, restart. Boom. My heart leaps as I hear the Windows welcome chime! I have my desktop with all my stuff as of November! Restoring the missing data is just a detail, and I’m back in business!  Aomei Backupper, you came through!

Antares is alive again!

Previously on the Star Rigger Chronicles…

We left our hero shedding more than one tear over his beloved laptop (It’s dead, Jim), which abruptly died a year to the day after purchase—and muttering imprecations about the manufacturer whose tech support said, “Sorry! Out of warranty!” It was a dark day.

But today, the shrouds of darkness have scattered! After receiving two voicemails from Asus asking if my problem has been resolved (Duh! No!), I (the hero is me) call them back. At first, the answer is the same, only better: “For an estimated $700, we will diagnose your machine and call you with a new estimate, which may be more. If you wish, you may dispute the new estimate.”

“Huh? Dispute the estimate? What does that even mean?”

“You can try to get a discount.”

 Groan. “Look, it died one year to the day after I bought it. Can’t you help me?”

Repeat refrain. Eventually, though, she says, “Let me put you on hold.” I hold. She comes back and says, “We are going to escalate this to corporate. You will get a call within 48 business hours.”

“Forty-eight business—” calculating in head “—does that mean six days?” No, that was just customer-support talk. It means two days.

Two hours later I get a call from corporate. They need a copy of my purchase receipt so they can escalate it again. I find the receipt, and with some difficulty get it scanned to a pdf. (The dead laptop is where I usually handle scanning.)

That was yesterday. Today I get the reply: “Yes, we will fix it under the warranty.”

From somewhere in the clouds, we hear, faintly, the triumphal sounds of John Williams and the London Symphony, playing the Throne Room theme from Star Wars! Yay!

Never give up! Never surrender!

My trusty laptop Antares failed to power up today, precisely one day after the warranty expired. Nothing, nada, dark. That would have been bad enough, but it was my second machine to bite the dust between last night and this morning. My amazing Panasonic DVD recorder, Grabber, kacked in the middle of a DVD burn last night and now sits lifeless, with a hard drive full of movies and TV shows. And to top it all off, squirrels picked last night to bite through the light string on our outdoor tree, killing the pretty blue lights we had left on to brighten the winter nights.

For the laptop I hoped that Asus, the manufacturer, might cut me a little slack, especially since I believe that it shut itself off last night—which is probably when whatever happened, happened, on the last day of the warranty. No dice, though: “You called today, and your machine is out of warranty.” I declined to send it to them, did all the standard troubleshooting stuff, and then mournfully carted it off to the local computer repair place.

ASUS, YOU ARE NOT A GENEROUS COMPANY TO YOUR CUSTOMERS! ONE LOUSY DAY!

Edit: Asus has reversed its position! More to come at eleven.

And then there’s the Panasonic. I love this machine, a DMR-E85H, for those who care about such things. I got my first one close to fifteen years ago, and it continues to be a great way to collect movies and favorite shows from cable. (Yes, it’s legal.) Even recording a standard def analogue signal, it does an impressive job. It’s pretty much my only hobby right now—well, along with beating on the timpani in the basement.

This is my second Grabber. They work great for years, and then something goes—usually capacitors, at first. You can open the case and see visually when capacitors have failed, and they’re big enough that even I can solder in new ones. And then eventually something less obvious goes, and you’re done. I will open up Grabber 2 a little later to see if I can fix it. But meanwhile, there’s one just like it on ebay, and I’m, er, grabbing it. They stopped making these things years ago. I may just turn out to be their last devoted user!

And as for the squirrels? Electrocution’s too good for you!

Yeah, this is not how I was planning to spend my first week at home. But my laptop, Cygnus-X, started failing on the trip and limped along just far enough to get me back to Boston. In this case it was the screen, not the smart innards, that went bad. I googled the problem and tried the most common fix, which was replacing the video inverter for $20 from Amazon; and that killed it dead. Here’s me, heroically trying to rescue trusty Cygnus, but it was too little, too late.

Given that the little fellow was over seven years old in laptop years—which is I don’t know what in dog years, but old, and slow—I decided it was time to replace it. (But really, two computers in three months? Seems extreme.) Anyway, here is the new beauty, Antares. Named for her glowing red backlit keys (Antares is a red star), and for the lovely Antares in the Chaos books.

Antares is an Asus gaming laptop. I don’t do gaming, but I wanted as much speed and capacity as I could afford, because in two years, it’s going to seem like molasses. So get a running start, is what I figured. Plus, I really like the keyboard!

Antares, live long and prosper! Please.