The Succeeder Stronghold

Chimaera182 · Post by **Chimaera182** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 7:30 am

Lovely, dependable, reliable GB. I posted a message in here twice and neither time would GB let it go through.

Let's see... well, short version: hard drive went boom yesterday, as well as my craptastic modem. After moving the modem to a different slot, it worked (so the port went bad, that's just great), and after a reformat, I was able to reinstall a ton of stuff to my main hard drive. I was so irked that I was glad I was scheduled to go out drinking with friends last night. I should be really hung over right now, but once again, I've escaped that particular nightmare. On the plus side (although it's a rather strange plus side) one of the friends who once saw me puke in a public place, now I can claim the same of her.

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 7:31 am

I hear ya...ive tried to play a few times before....just not my thing..

Fiona · Post by **Fiona** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 7:37 am

@ Chim. Computers are irritating but not so irritating as tech support people. The night before last one of these individuals told me the problem could only be fixed if I went out to a cyber cafe and followed a complicated set of instructions to download something on to a disc and bring it back here and install it. Like I would manage that

And the sad part was I manged to fix it myself eventually. I mean I managed to fix it. How hard could it have been? :laugh:

@ Juni. It is the game of choice for computer techies and used car salesmen, I am fully convinced. A sad waste of brains...

Chimaera182 · Post by **Chimaera182** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:01 am

[QUOTE=Fiona]@ Chim. Computers are irritating but not so irritating as tech support people. The night before last one of these individuals told me the problem could only be fixed if I went out to a cyber cafe and followed a complicated set of instructions to download something on to a disc and bring it back here and install it. Like I would manage that

And the sad part was I manged to fix it myself eventually. I mean I managed to fix it. How hard could it have been? :laugh:[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I've heard horror stories of tech support. Fortunately, my mother is well versed in many things computer, so she functioned as my tech support. As it happened, I probably could have done it all myself, but I was just afraid to do anything that might have reprecussions down the road (ie I wanted someone else to blame if things got worse :laugh: ). We spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out what had happened (I was getting Inaccessible Boot Device while booting up, and this happened three times), then the next hour was formatting the drive. I lost nothing extremely vital on the drive, due to my actually having planned on wiping that very drive anyway; I figured it might help my computer if I did a hard drive wipe, so I moved any critical, unduplicated stuff from the main drive to the back-up. I did lose all my Favorites, though, and recreating that massive list of websites I go to often will be a pain. I also lost about 9... uh... merchant ivory films. :laugh: The rest are safe on my other drive, though.

Aww, c'mon, chess is fun.

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:09 am

[QUOTE=Fiona]@ Juni. It is the game of choice for computer techies and used car salesmen, I am fully convinced. A sad waste of brains...[/QUOTE]
Haaaa!! Yes exxxactally! :laugh:

T-minus 3 hours and counting!

Darzog · Post by **Darzog** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:17 am

Chim (and Fiona),

The best way to take the step and be more comfortable working on computers is to do it once at your own pace. Make backups of all your stuff (including your My Documents folder, bookmarks, game saves, etc), make a list of all the software installed on your computer (walk through all folders in your Start Menu and Program Files directories) and make sure you have the install discs or files for them all. Once you have those two things, you can be certain that even if your computer melts through the floor, you can build up another computer to the same level that you currently have.

Once that is done, just reformat your harddrive. Make sure you have the discs for your operating system!!! After you reinstall everything you will feel much more comfortable about your computer having problems because you will know that even if it is a disaster you can recover.

Another thing that helps is if you've done an upgrade or two. Whether it be adding a disc burner, upgrading your CD/DVD drives, adding a new or bigger harddrive, upgrading your graphics card.... just being comfortabel to open the case and start unplugging things is a big step.

And a tip.... having a backup of your favorites or using an online bookmark feature is really useful. If you use Firefox, FoxMarks let's you sync bookmarks between multiple computers but works just as well to restore bookmarks once you've wiped your drive. Another site I've heard about but haven't tried is del.icio.us

ik911 · Post by **ik911** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:20 am

[QUOTE=Darzog]Ik,

Just curious who you were calling a hipocrit.[/QUOTE]

Were you going to sue me?

<if answer >= "yes" >
The message was directed straight at you! And your children and grandchildren will not be able to read the letter F for all their lives.

<else>
The message was not directed at you and you will have a nice dream about angels and fairies, which you will forget the day after.

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:25 am

Oh! angels and fairies!! How very fluffy & nice

Darzog · Post by **Darzog** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:44 am

[QUOTE=ik911]Were you going to sue me?

<if answer >= "yes" >
The message was directed straight at you! And your children and grandchildren will not be able to read the letter F for all their lives.

<else>
The message was not directed at you and you will have a nice dream about angels and fairies, which you will forget the day after.[/QUOTE]
Can the fairies and angels be scantily clad? If so we've got a deal.

Boy are my legs mush this morning. My run yesterday (in the rain no less) was very rough, but I beat my goal so now I'm pretty sure I can do the 5k at the pace I want. Yay!

Fluff and pooft all around.

Chimaera182 · Post by **Chimaera182** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 8:59 am

I've done backups of certain things (not really my My Documents folder, because I keep nothing in there, but of my Documents folder, which was something I created and put in some bizarre place on my second drive) a few times. And I'm more than comfortable with dealing with hardware issues; one of the side benefits of having a parent who deals a lot with computers is that I got a lot of hands-on training growing up. I have helped my mother put some computers together (she prefers to buy them piecemeal and put them together herself) and I've dealt with the insides of my computers several times (although one serious hard drive corruption occured once due to an improper jumper setting, which resulted in the loss of critical [to me] files, for which no back-ups existed since at the time I had no CD burner and my floppy disk port was bad). I can easily find my way around an inside of a computer; I may not know exactly what everything is, but I have the basics practically hard-wired into my skull, and could put a whole computer together if necessary.

I'm very comfortable dealing with a computer's insides... it's the software I'm not so comfy with. It's not that my mom didn't teach me the stuff; far from it, it was because I was so well versed in software issues growing up that I was a holy terror. My mother feared me on the computer more than she did my computer-illiterate father; she said that a little knowledge is more dangerous than none. My dad wouldn't poke around in things he didn't understand, whereas I have been known to play "Hide the icon" in the Windows Registry (gimme a break, I was like 11 or 12). In the past, whenever my computer stopped working, the first thing my mother would ask was "Did you delete anything?" Almost automatically, when I told her about the problem yesterday, I wanted to say "Before you ask, I did not delete anything." But I've been out of that particularly-dangerous phase for a long time now, so much so that I'm sometimes reluctant to mess with things without supervision. I'd actually been planning to wipe that drive for months, and have been moving critical files from the main drive to my second drive for a while now. But I had intended to back-up my Favorites list and move those 9 movies first (actually, I was going to burn them). And I wasn't going to do the actual work of the format and reinstall myself, although I did have the software and could have; I just figure, aside from having someone else to blame if something goes wrong, that it's better to let someone else deal with it in case something unforeseen happens (as often is the case).

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:00 am

[QUOTE=Darzog]Boy are my legs mush this morning. My run yesterday (in the rain no less) was very rough, but I beat my goal so now I'm pretty sure I can do the 5k at the pace I want. Yay!

Fluff and pooft all around.[/QUOTE]

I knew you would appreciated the Fluff & Poof!

Oh! and congrats on beating your goal!

Magelord648 · Post by **Magelord648** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:01 am

Hello

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:02 am

*waves* hello ML!

good day so far?

Lestat · Post by **Lestat** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:02 am

On Darzog's request:

Magelord648 · Post by **Magelord648** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:07 am

[QUOTE=Juniper]*waves* hello ML!

good day so far?[/QUOTE]
It's been ok. It's my mums birthday but she's been at work. I've just been playing runescape at my nans. You?

Damuna_Nova · Post by **Damuna_Nova** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:15 am

[QUOTE=Magelord648]It's been ok. It's my mums birthday but she's been at work. I've just been playing runescape at my nans. You?[/QUOTE]

Rule One: You don't talk about RuneScape.

Juniper · Post by **Juniper** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:16 am

[QUOTE=Magelord648]It's been ok. It's my mums birthday but she's been at work. I've just been playing runescape at my nans. You?[/QUOTE]

It's been good so far!

Lookiing forward to the weekend!

Darzog · Post by **Darzog** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:19 am

Juni gets to leave early today. *grumble* while I get to sit for 4 hours in front of a laser marker loading and unloading parts.

But I'll be having migas for lunch so it's not all bad.

Thanks Lestat.

Magelord648 · Post by **Magelord648** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:22 am

[QUOTE=Damuna_Nova]Rule One: You don't talk about RuneScape.

[/QUOTE]
Why?

Fiona · Post by **Fiona** » Fri Jul 21, 2006 9:30 am

[QUOTE=Darzog]Chim (and Fiona),

The best way to take the step and be more comfortable working on computers is to do it once at your own pace. Make backups of all your stuff (including your My Documents folder, bookmarks, game saves, etc)[/quote]

See this is the problem. I don't have any idea how to do that. I thought I did, but it didn't work when I tried it. So anything after that is a non-starter