Sometimes troubleshooting is easy

Wed Apr 4th, 2001 11:06:29 PM EST

Diary Entry 5
[ << Prev | Diary Index | Next >> ]

This morning I was awakened by the sound of my phone ringing.

It was my very smart and rather cute, but nontechnical, friend, Cammie Smith. She announced that she had, in her words, "a computer emergency!" "Oh, crap," I think, "her hard drive's blown up, or her monitor died again, and I'm going to have to recover some paper for a class. There goes the morning." She went into some more detail. "It won't turn on." She explained that when she pushes the power switch, nothing happens.

Fortunately, I'd seen this before. Sometimes, power supplies can do weird things, especially on ATX boxes. You just unplug it for a while and let it cool and that usually fixes it. I told her this and she said that she'd call me back after she tried it. "I just put it to sleep last night," she added, "and this morning it won't wake up when I hit the button."

Of course this changed everything. Sleep mode never works right. On the other hand, the fix is the same thing. I hung up and went back to sleep.

When she called back, she said that it was working fine now. So I scored some brownie points there, I guess. It's too bad that I probably won't ever get a chance to redeem them for brownies :-) It's nice when things are so easy.