Annals of Computing

Why does this keep happening to me?

For some reason, I have a history of computers catastrophically crashing on me.  Back in 2012, my hard drive crashed and I was lucky that the IT team at the local computer repair shop were able to retrieve at least some of the data, most notably the report for a project I had been working on for a client for the previous several months.  In addition to considerable embarrassment, the loss of that file would have cost me several thousands of dollars, both in lost revenue and in compensatory time to recreate the effort for which I had already billed the client.

I wasn't so lucky when the hard drive on my next computer crashed in 2016.  They weren't able to recover anything from that hard drive, and I lost all of my hundreds of gigs of music files and my entire directory of digital photographs, the visual document of the prior two decades of my life. Fortunately, there were no revenue-generating documents on that particular hard drive on that particular day, but I irretrievably lost everything else and learned an important lesson on how much of our lives (and livelihood) is bound up in these electronic devices.

After that, I finally got an external hard drive for backup (thanks, Britney!) along with another new computer, my third since 2012.  It was running great - it's a super-powerful, gaming laptop - until just about the time I retired last June.  No data was lost in a hard drive crash, but it wouldn't start up properly and I couldn't access my files or any apps.  I thought it was a hardware problem, but the boys down at the IT shop (whom I've gotten to know pretty well by now) told me I only needed to replace the OS with the newest build of Windows 10.

That solved the problem, although there was a little drama due to my own operator error during the upgrade (I lost/misplaced all of my stored passwords), but with the new OS installed, the 2016 laptop ran great - just like new, if not even better.

Until yesterday.  After a normal day of use and functionality on Tuesday, I went to start up the computer Wednesday morning and was greeted by the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  After an excruciatingly long 15 seconds, the start up screen finally appeared, but it took an inordinately long time for it to accept my password, and once it did, the screen suddenly went black.

I rebooted and had the same results (slow, laggy startup, followed by blackness).  But after a few minutes, text appeared at the bottom of the screen stating "Diagnosing Problem," so I went and got a cup of coffee and let the computer figure it all out by itself.  When I returned, the screen was still black, but the text said, "Repairing Damaged Drive - May Take An Hour To Complete," so I left it by itself to self-repair what ever the problem was.

It used every minute of the forecast one hour to complete the repair, and then some.  But by noon, the computer was finally operating, but that's when I discovered that it was operating extremely slow.  It would take 60 seconds to open a window in Google Chrome and even longer to open any other app.  The computer was, in a word, unusable, at least if you didn't want to wait five minutes every time you clicked something to see what would happen next.  I rebooted several times, and on each successive reboot, it seemed to only operate slower than before.

You might think I've got it fixed by now - how else am I writing this if not?  - but this post is being composed, just like yesterday's post, on the old laptop that crashed in 2016 (I had a new hard drive installed, and kept the computer around as a contingency for just this kind of event).  But this old laptop still has its issues - an old Windows 7 OS, no gaming capability, and a damaged screen hinge that won't allow the laptop to be closed.  It's better than nothing, but why do my computers keep failing on me?

Does this happen to everyone, and they just don't talk about it? I don't see a constant litany of complaints on social media about crashed computers, and my friends and colleagues haven't mentioned similar problems over the course of these events.  I must be doing something wrong, but I honestly have no idea what.

The other computer, the powerful, gaming laptop, is still self-diagnosing right now.  It's going through all of the troubleshooting and self-correcting functions built into the Windows 10 OS, but each step is slow as molasses and takes literally hours to complete.  Disturbingly, the "System Check" reported that everything's fine - no problems here! - so I don't feel confident that I'm going to get this thing self-corrected.  If all else fails, I'll re-install Windows 10 again (after safely securing my passwords first) and if that doesn't work, it's back to the boyos at the IT shop.  

Good thing I'm retired and now have the time for all of this shit.

Update: 7:45 p.m.  - Fixed it!  Downloaded an update to Windows 10.  It took forever to d.l.  and even longer to install, but once it did, everything was running smooth again!