I've been waiting for my friend Cindy to send me some pictures of my birthday sweater that she knitted so I could post them on my site for all the world to see. She hasn't figgered out how to attach them. She says that she has to move them to another file before they can be attached to an e-mail.
She called me Saturday and says she tried to move them and wound up losing them. She doesn't know how. It's a PC. She's running Windows XP. I know how. It's Windoze. Now, she says, she cannot download the pictures from the camera to the PC. Her USB port is not working. I tell her it is probably a hardware problem. The card the port on is probably loose.
Now remember. I'm a programmer. We are taught to say, "It's a hardware problem". Here is one of the first rules of shooting software bugs: If a piece of code works (with the exception of anything written by Microsoft), and then stops working, it is not the code. Something has changed. Code (unless it was written by Microsoft) does not just stop working. Ergo, it is hardware.
Cindy e-mailed tech support. A live call costs $20 but an e-mail is free. So tech support e-mailed back that it wasn't a hardware problem (It is Windoze after all.) and sends her instructions on how to fix it. Cindy's a nurse. I cannot hang an IV or do other medical stuff. She cannot do computer stuff. How many people can? I'm not all that good on PC's. I like to work on stuff that works all the time, like mainframes.
Since she was having me over for dinner, she asked if I would come early and do what tech support told her to do. OK.
I got there and the first hurdle was getting me up the steps to the computer on the second floor of her house. My walking has gone downhill and steps are getting much harder to do. I got up OK and looked at the instructions and started following them. Of course, they were wrong, but I knew what they wanted us to do.
Tech support wanted us to come up in Safe mode and deinstall the USB port and any devices on it. Then reboot the PC and let Windoze find the port and reinstall. After that, the PC couldn't find the printer. OK, I'll reinstall the driver. Nope didn't work.
By that time Michael came home and it was time to get down to the serious stuff like eating dinner and drinking wine. Cindy e-mailed tech support that their fix didn't work and what should she do next.
After a nice dinner and three bottles of wine (I had taken over a 1992 Syrah that needed to be drunk) I went home and went to bed.
Cindy called me the next day and said tech support said she needed to restore her system. She asked if she would lose her pictures. I asked if they told her to reformat and do a complete install or if she was just supposed to plop in the CD that came with the PC.
As an aside here, that very same question was asked by someone writing the PC guru for the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation in Sunday's paper. We both answered the same way: Theoretically, it shouldn't.
I asked her if she had some way she could offload the pictures to some other type of media? Nope. No burner. No floppies. Fortunately, Cindy mainly uses this PC for e-mail, web browsing, and storing pictures. No financial stuff like Quicken.
She called me two hours later. The pictures were gone and the USB port still didn't work. I told her to do what I should have told her to do Saturday. Hey! I'm getting old. My skills are eroding. I told her to try the USB port in the rear of the machine.
"There's a USB port back there?"
"Should be."
She called me back 45 minutes later. The one in the back works! So guess what? The one in the front probably has a loose connection.
It's a hardware problem!
Now she wants to know if the port in front can be fixed and it has felt loose when she plugged a cable in. I tell her it probably can, but she would have to take the cover off to see.
This sounds like a job for a highly trained and highly paid data processing professional. Me. Maybe I can get another free dinner out of it.
In the meantime, I told her she might want to think about finding some way to backup her important pictures.
There is a chance the pictures are still out there and Windoze just lost them with the reload. Tomorrow I get to tell her about the Windoze Find function.
Posted by denny at November 30, 2003 11:04 PM