Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

Does anyone here perform exorcisms on electrical goods? I'm only half kidding. I'm coming to the conclusion every device in my house hates me :P

My brand new digibox, installed by Sky after weeks of pain and signal problems, has decided it doesn't like being switched on so it switches itself off. Then on again. Then off. Then occasionally, by way of variety, it shuts itself down completely (i.e. it's not on standby, it's OFF off...). I have, at the moment, having spent the first half of this week beating the snot out of the power cable and all the other connections, finally got it to stay switched on for 3 days. However I'm terrified to sneeze within 3 feet of the thing in case it goes off again. And on again. And off again...*wibbles*

I will ring Sky and wail at them and with a bit of luck it'll still be under warranty from the last visit so there should be no call out charge. Again. And I can get a new box. Can't have the call out until at least a week on Friday though, so I can accrue some hours towards the time off I'll need.

Then there's my oh so shiny new PC. The one that's a week old. The one that's decided it hates DVDs and videos and will have a hissy fit by rebooting itself. Sadly, the error report doesn't have enough detail for PC World to determine the cause, so having spent 30 minutes on hold to the 24 hour support line (at least this time around, I HAVE support for any PC issues), the nice man at the end of the phone showed me how to turn off the "reboot when there's an error" problem, so that next time, I'll get a Blue Screen of Death with an error message that will actually tell them what the problem is. Happily, thanks to the support package I bought, they will just fix anything at no cost to me, beyond possibly needing yet another day off work. *sighs* Maybe I can get them and Sky to visit on the same day.

So yes. Old priest, young priest, whatever - I have a small job for you :P

I think it's dead, Jim. Just not sure what to do now. Got home, plugged it in and it immediately started the clicking and whirring. A boot disk didn't help, because it's not recognising anything and I have no way of kicking it and making it do something other that whatever it is it's trying to do. (Well I can physically kick it, obviously, but that wouldn't help much :P)

To me this says my HD is borked.

silenttex - a question for you. Is there ANY way of taking the HD out and stuffing it into another box as a second HD in a bid to extract information from it? I'm sure the answer is no, all the information on that drive is lost to me but I'll try anything once at this point :)

Second question, for everyone :), I clearly need a new HD but it's been years since I did any component shopping. Any suggestions for a good HD with ooooodles of GB storage? What sort of prices am I looking at?

However, I do have good news. After much muttering, cursing, use of crowbar and copious amounts of duct tape, I've got my Win '98 box all sorted out and I have my internet and email back again. Hurrah! Took some doing though, but I got there. Once I had internet access, upgrading stuff and patching things was a hell of a lot easier. Good googly moogly IE and MSN took some updating :P Flash, java, VB scripting, gawd knows what else. And then upgrading AIM caused Msvcrt.dll to be overwritten causing all sorts of interesting IE crashes. Found a good fix for that in the end but sheesh!

However, I am impressed deeply by how much help is still online for Win '98. *cuddles her internet*

In not so good news, I've rediscovered Snood, which I never transferred over to the new PC. Oh dear. That's a few more hours of my life lost to a game :P

It's funny how the loss of so much stuff on my other PC is being soothed by the fact I can get online from home. Possibly I need counselling....