Here, not there

[mellicious]

I am back online, sorta. Or rather, I am back online, but not on the computer I would like to be online with. Luckily (I suppose) we had brought my mother's two-year-old Compaq home with us over the weekend, because the Dell refuses to reboot. At all. I have no idea why, other than the fact that I'm pretty sure that a magnet - a fairly weak one, I think - does seem to have come into contact with the computer during the move. That would be bad, I suppose, right? I was too busy today to worry about it, anyway. I would really like to just buy a new computer rather than trying to fix it, but I think my husband will divorce me if I do that without convincing him it is really, really necessary first. This means I have to at least pay some pretty serious lip service to trying to fix it first. (If you're wanting to be helpful, it's not actually that it won't REboot - it won't boot at all. Nada. The power comes on, and that's it. I tried hitting F8 - that's what gets it into safe mode, right? and still nothing.)

Other than that, the move went fine. I am not blaming the movers for whatever is wrong with the computer. So when the cable guy came this morning, rather than having him try to hook up the nonfunctional computer in the living room, I had him do the one in the bedroom that actually worked. Thus, actual high-speed internet, and (forcolumbina's info) I was able to get GW up and functioning, if slightly sluggishly and with many, many pauses for downloads, just now. (We went up to Mom's house today to retrieve her microwave, which got forgotten in the press of other things yesterday, and when we passed the brand-shiny-new Best Buy on the freeway, I thought, Y'know, I shoulda just dropped the computer off with them to see what they could've made of it. But I didn't think of it then.)

Yesterday I saw my first-ever female mover. Maybe we are backwards in this part of the country, as we are in many other ways, goodness knows, but I had never ever seen a girl on a moving crew before. She was not exactly burly (not a bit) but she had some muscle somewhere because she got it done. Although admittedly I didn't really see her holding up one end of any terribly heavy furniture - the two guys on the crew seemed to be handling most of that - still, she was slinging boxes around like a pro. We had the three-pronged move going on: old apartment to new apartment to Mom's and back to new apartment, and they got it done in a bit over 5 hours, I think, which was pretty good considering there was about an hour and a half of driving in there. Everything is a mess but I do have my sewing room! Yay!

Comments

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Hey, you're moved! Congratulations.

My thinking is that a weak magnet on the outside of the computer case would not do much. At worst maybe a little data corruption on the hard drive. It would take a very strong magnet to do major damage from outside.

There are two more likely possibilities. One is less catastrophic than the other, although it may not seem that way to you.

One is that something shook loose. This happens all the time. It's why, every time I've moved, my computers do NOT go in the moving truck but the back seat of my car. Movers, no matter how good they are, do not handle computers carefully and moving trucks are not known for their shock absorbers.

The cure to that is to open the case and make sure everything is seated properly - that all the cable connectors are firmly fastened, that all cards are sitting properly and fully in their slots, etc. This can be a bit daunting if you don't know what you're looking at.

The second possibility is that your hard drive actually suffered damage while being shaken around. This one's a lot harder to fix.

Do you get a Dell logo or any sort of startup screen at all? Never mind Windows starting, we know it doesn't get that far, and the F8 key for safe mode is a Windows thing.

If you really get absolutely no onscreen cue that your computer is doing anything, then it's probably NOT the hard drive, because that Dell logo and the initial startup come from BIOS (fixed, permanent memory) and it's not even getting as far as the hard drive yet.

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

No, no Dell logo. (Except when I flipped the power on & off at the surge protector, and I think that one came from the monitor itself, not the computer.) The power does come on but nothing at all happens after that. I did pull the cover off but I didn't specifically check to see whether things were seated right - I should have thought of that. I'll do that tonight.

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I did intend to move the computer myself, but Rob was late getting back from the damn gym and my back was already complaining rather loudly, and so when the movers said they'd do it, I said to go ahead. They were being pretty careful as far as I could see, but you never know. (And I agree with you about the moving trucks, generally, but bear in mind that they only drove about half a block with it.)

[jenzieg.livejournal.com]

Glad you survived the move! Having just completed one myself, I empathize. It's a good feeling when the bulk of it is OVER.

[(Anonymous)]

That's what happens when I blow a video card. I blow them quite regularly.