Predictable errors and no identity

My computer is failing. Little by little it has been going bad; a long slow painful death. At first it was little things. Nothing too obvious that it was the hard drive. I started having problems viewing files. If a webpage has an embedded file, I can’t watch it. But if I go directly to the source, I can. That started in one browser, then another, then another; each collapsing over time. More recently, I lost the ability to use the center mouse button. It’s still set up in the system to work — it just refuses to. From time to time, my ability to right click will disappear. Normal tasks that used to operate at a reasonable speed has started slowing down and freezing up my PC. I had defragged, virus checked, removed ad/spyware, and nothing was helping. It’s been incredibly frustrating because I knew something was wrong, just didn’t know what.

The day I left for Canada (Oct 6), the cable internet went out after I left. At first, mom somehow expected me to be able to fix it from 1100+ miles away. My brother showed up, and he helped her call the cable company and deal with them to find out what was going on. (Later we discovered it was actually the electric company’s fault. They were having issues and sending intentional power surges down the line to diagnose their problem. Those surges kept messing up the modem since I had forgotten to put it back on it’s surge protector when I rehooked up the PC a in September. Oops. Thankfully the rest of the PC was shut down AND protected. Evil power company.) While mom was on the phone with the cable company, they dialed into my pc. The tech asked mom “You know there’s something wrong with your PC, right?” To which my mom told him I did know. He told her that we could call Sony and they would help us with it. If *I* had been home, I would have asked him WHAT was wrong with it, since I knew it was messed up, but had no idea HOW. But, at least him saying that verified to me that there was indeed something wrong, and I wasn’t just hallucinating things.

When I got back home, I was told to run a drive scan. I did and sure enough my main hard drive has bad sectors. I’m installing Seagate’s desktop drive scan (but this process is taking multiple days because of the hard drive issues) to do a better scan and see what’s wrong with it. It’s starting to get a little worse, freezing up more. So, while I’m still running pretty well, I’m also burning CDs of important things so I don’t lose them. I’ve also uploaded a bunch of stuff onto my websites for storage purposes. I am trying to sign up for the free trial of the Spare Backup service, so that I can protect as much of my data as possible. Unfortunately, I’m having problems with that as well. Grrr.

3 thoughts on “Predictable errors and no identity”

  1. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again – Just be thankful it’s a slow death. Those quick ones? Are much much much more painful because all your stuff goes with them for good. And then you cry and threaten to throw your laptop out the window of your 11th floor apartment ha. At least you’ve still got the chance to save some of your stuff.

  2. I know, and I believe you. I remember how bad it was for you. It’s been dying longer than I’ve known, a big chunk of me wishes I’d realised it sooner. I’m half scared I’m not going to be able to get everything important off here in time, since the death is speeding up now.

    *snuggles lots* I still hate that it did that to you so many times.

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