How are we doing?

I tell you, the way the last week has gone in the life of the bartonomus, I am beginning to feel like the stars have misaligned themselves. Holy Crap! Last Thursday I had one of these machines refuse to boot to windows. Of, course this has critical data to our day to day operation that has not been backed up so after 3-4 hours of carefully trying to restore the thing without losing any data Iwas successful. It is still acting weird on startup but it is running otherwise normally.

Then, my co-worker who is not very tech savy has his home machine catch the crud. It has some data that is important to a project that has been going on for a while so my boss volunteers us (he and I are the resident IT department, by default). He give it a go and by Friday lets me at it. Well, after several different types pf attempts, I get the thing to at least get to the WindowsXP splash screen. From there I know I can make some things happen. Repaired XP but lost alll and I mean all the data. I ran a Linux based utility of of a hand dandy cd and it scans it and I found the virus and got rid off it.

I told him several times that I was trying to do every “non-destructive” repair I could find. I honestly think the data was lost before I even touched it. After telling him that his machine was running but I will have to recover what I can he informs me that he had all of his tax records and about 10k photos on that machine. And he did not back them up. OY! The machine had a 60GB hard drive. After getting working it showed 46GB of free space. I recovered 49 GB of data after lettig it runn over the weekend. So i try to find a storage solution for him and then he says he has a hard drive that we can store it to in his car. Cool, external 250GB I think. Wrong, internal 250GB HD. So I tear his machine apart and install it, initialize and let it format as I go home for dinner. Yesteday I get the tfiles saved and put in the new drive so he can go through and keep what he needs (I sure as hell ain’t gonna go through 49 gigs of someody else’s data). Install AVG so he has some antivirus. FAIL! He is so far behind on updates I have to run Windows Update so AVG caan run. After 67 updates including XP service pack 2. I get it installed. Run the scan overnight and come in this morning.

As well as dealing with all that, I had to fix another of the big machines that needed to have it’s video card replaced. It started acting up and then just quit working. I usedthe Dell online chat and trouble shot it and they got me a new by lunch and he was up and running when he got back from lunch.

My computer has been having issues as well but nothing major, just enough to piss me off while trying to do everything else. Fixing those issues as they come up.

So I got home last night and really felt the need to run anti-virus scas and updates on all our machines just in case. Nothing major there, knock wood. So I came in this morning and check my co-workers machine and it had runs the scan and took care of the minor issues. restarted it to update everything and she is running well. I unhook it from the monitor I used to fix thins and move the other machine back in its place. and then I hear, I bought some more RAM to put in the machine to make it run better, can we put that in today? Here we go…..

BTW, I am a drafter.