Problem: My laptop, after an incomplete hibernation, left me with a blinking cursor and me cursing when all the usual tricks didn’t work.
Solution: After Googling, doodling and racking my brain, I finally just thought like a computer. As a result, I’m typing away again.
This Toshiba Satellite M200 has been pretty good until now. I’ve had it for almost 2 years and apart from overheating on warm days, it’s been a pretty solid machine. I do lots of video editing on it and the speed at which it renders is quite impressive for a tiny laptop.
However, impressed I was not when, during a long night of tapping out a script, my battery died. It made a feeble attempt to go to sleep just prior to this, but as the battery gave out it’s last squirt of power, Windows wrote about all the lovely things I had been typing and how it wanted to remember them later, but then all went black.
My natural recourse was to plug in the power. That I did. I saw a flash screen for Phoenix Labs, as one might see while the computer wakes up. No boot options or suggestions to hit the Delete key. Then a black screen, a flashing cursor and nothing happening in the hard drive department. No worries, I thought. Corrupted restore file is the problem. I’ll just shut off the power and hold the button a really long time. This is how I show my laptop I really mean business.
After that didn’t work, I still wasn’t worried. I’ll take out the battery. If things get serious and button pushing doesn’t work, start the strategic withdrawal phase. Know that this phase, once started, could lead to the computer’s destruction, as each increasingly integral component is taken out and yet the game goes on. Battery comes out easily. Goes back in seconds later. There, the hardware will be power starved, not remember anything and the system will reboot from scratch. But after another boot, there is that damn black screen and cursor, blinking at me as though taunting me. Off, on, off, on, you don’t treat me well… on, off, on, off, you suck at computers.
Here was I, trying to work this out in a civilized way. I push a button here, I push a button there, computer works. We don’t have to create a scene. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. But you made me pull out your battery because you still didn’t work after I had tried so hard to be polite. And now we’ve already crossed over to the dark side. Now I have a taste for this game of torture. What will it take for you to work for me?
I took out, then replaced the RAM. Blink, blink, ha, ha.
I pulled out the hard drive, plugged it back in. No, no, blinked the screen.
I inserted said hard drive into a portable unit and checked to see it was working. All was well.
I racked the internet, which told me to hold the power button for a minute, run boot disks (obviously no boot menu so can’t boot), change Windows power options (hello, not booting!) or update my BIOS. The cursor actually found the last one quite amusing. Blink, blink, go ahead and try, it said.
I have no idea where the nearest Toshiba shop is. I really didn’t want to have to find out. I had to come up with another solution. I spend a good part of my day sitting in front of my computer and if that vast stretch of time is gone I might start reading books or doing something productive. As you can see, I desperately needed a solution.
Toshiba laptop, turns on. What happens? What would I do if I were that laptop. The first thing I do of a morning is check to see that I’ve got all my bits. Legs, arms, face, dick, balls, OK. It really is all a man needs to be a man. Everything else is extraneous. Sure, I’ll put a T-shirt on and may even wear pants, but first I’m checking to make sure I have some legs to put in those pants. So, if I’m a computer waking up from a deep sleep, I think I’ll be checking to see that my parts are all cool. If they are, then move on to the hard disk boot sequence and let Windows do the rest.
I’m going to pause here to mention that my approach to problem solving my computer is to FBM. First blame Microsoft. There’s no passion there. It’s all for show. I guess companies are a lot like their founders. In this case, bland. That’s how I see Microsoft. I’m going to have a little rant about my phone with its Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system in the very near future, I can feel it. When a problem arises, I assume that it’s a Windows fault. For example, when going to sleep, have a tag to say not complete. When the session saving has finished, change that tag to finished. When the system boots up, if session saving tag reads finished, restore it. If it reads not finished, do a fresh boot. Simple.
So in my mind, it’s the point after the system check that everything goes wrong. So I try to make the security check fail. I pull out the hard disk again, but this time leave it out. I turn on the computer. The now-familiar Phoenix logo flashes, the little blue bar down the bottom fills, then…
Black screen, flashing cursor. Its blinks seem slower this time, as though it was an effort to blink them out. It says, “you got me”. Suddenly, a bunch of white writing appears. Hardware failure! Blah, blah, blah! I reset the computer, plug in the hard drive and voila! We’re back to standard boot-up.
The whole process from start to finish took almost 2 days. I am most unsettled when Google can’t solve my problems. It has become like a big brother to me and when it doesn’t come through, I’m left vulnerable, having to use my own brain for a change. But my brain proved that it is still working and that it, with the help of a little Microsoft distrust, could still save me from a life of productivity.
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‘Mental Block’ by Elif Ozkoc
