ellarien | Overdependence on technology (Reply)

Last weekend was not a good one for me, technologically. For a start, the home desktop is mysteriously not keeping good time, which caused me (having grown accustomed to trusting the computer clock more than the wall-clock above it) to have to rush for the bus on Saturday afternoon; then I got to work and found that the desktop there, (a heavy-duty Linux PC with a terabyte of raid disk, 4Gb of RAM and two 3GHz processorts, three years old but hitherto almost entirely problem-free), had frozen and wouldn't reboot; and then the PDA had somehow gotten configured to alarm silently, so I was late getting up on Sunday morning.

This morning the work desktop booted for the technical guru as if butter wouldn't melt in its floppy drive. Then it fell over again in the late afternoon, booted up under the eye of a different technical person, fell over again five minutes later and took three goes to boot for me ... we have no clue, but I suspect it's a hardware issue rather than software. And then it was time to come home. (And of course the home desktop was still hooked up to the hub after last night's backup, and wouldn't boot under those conditions, but that's a minor issue I know how to deal with.)