Broken Computers = Lack of Progress

Partly it is my fault, I did something stupid. I turned on the computer during a lightning storm. I was playing this stupid game called tribalwars www.tribalwars.net in order to forget about the unhappy project team I have that fights each other instead of working on the project. The dumb thing about it is you have to log in at certain times to coordinate attacks on the targets, otherwise they can defend against each attack by stacking the village with troops and then moving the troops around. It is played in real time and some people seem to play it 24/7, but I think that is just more than one person playing the same account.

So that is when the lighting storm hit. Usually, I would have just logged in the laptop that is sort of resistant to power surges, but I did not. The power turned off and on at least once. At first I thought the computer was ok, but then my mouse locked up in the middle of making a tribal wars move. So then I rebooted it. It turned out the mouse and keyboard would not work at all, so I rebooted it again. Then it would turn on, that is the fans and mother board lights, but I would never get to the POST screen before you get to the grub menu. No beeps, although the cd light would turn on. I tried removing the battery. I considered flashing the bios, but I am not sure that would work. It is too much of a pain because you need a floppy disk a=d a way to format it in dos, so I would need a dos system. The only one I can think of is mom's old laptop that is connected to the internet.

I spent most of the month of June trying to figure out what was wrong with it, trying to fix the computer, and then ordering a new one. I thought maybe I could just use that old pentium3. It turns out the ide harddisk on it is dead, and the scsi does not have enough space to install an os made after like 1995 or so. Then I tried to back up the contents of the hard disk on the broke system to some dvds (the hard disk from the system is ok and has all its contents). It would not copy some of the files because of permissions. (I had a triple boot system, and only ubuntu boots because of the hardware drivers, I plugged the old disk into another old system that over heats when you use it too much) I have not tried it again recently after I looked up how to use chown. The new computer I ordered is supposed to be good, but I have not gotten it yet. They admitted they are taking longer than they should with it (although being a custom system I shouldn't expect it rush rush) It isn't all that high end. I got a desktop because it can have a faster processor than a laptop.