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Last week was a rough one in my plugged in digital life. It was a veritable perfect storm of when good tech goes bad. It’s amazing how dependant we become on our gadgets, we take them for granted and expect them to always be working. But what happens when things don’t go the way we need?
Tuesday- I love my TiVo HD unit. It records many of my favorite shows in HD and last Christmas my parents gave me a Western Digital TiVo certified external drive to increase the capacity of recording shows in HD. My relationship with this external drive has been a rocky one. About 6 months into owning it I needed to move my TV cabinet out from the wall. The unit is on wheels to make moving it easy. When I moved the unit I accidentally vibrated the WD HD unit. Now we are talking mild vibration. After I was done and went to power up the TV the TiVo was telling me that it could not detect an external drive connected. After multiple reboots it finally came back up. This problem would rear it’s ugly head every once in a while but I was able to fix it. Lately though, the unit has begun to take on a life of it’s own. It would crash while watching recorded programs or it would just say the equivalent of a digital F-You and stop working altogether. On Tuesday, it had enough and just died all together. $115 down the drain after only a little more than a year. (The unit was out of warranty) This along with several programs that I loved were lost.
Wednesday- My UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) decided that “I really don’t want to work anymore” and right in the middle of a project I had a surge through the system. Normally, the unit would function perfectly and handle the surge with no problem. Not today. The back-up battery in the unit was now fried and would no longer work, this along with my PC just shutting off in the middle of a vital project. My UPS had been basically reduced to a $2 Wal-Mart extension cord. Price to replace the battery $40.
Thursday - With my week in tech now spiraling out of control, it was now my PC’s turn to need some love. Heck, everything else was crashing down so why not pick now to start having corruption problems. My PC runs Windows Vista. I never could figure out why manufacturers were so slow to create drivers and software for this much maligned operating system. Well, after running Vista for 2 years I realize that Vista has become the replacement for Windows ME. Anyways, I had noticed that the system was become very creaky and programs that ran fine before had become corrupted . Even Windows Task Manager was corrupted. So I decided to reformat the Hard Drive. I have no problems with this except that it takes on average 13 hours to restore everything back to where it was. So after countless hours, the software was reinstalled. For the record, I also own a Mac, which hasn’t been immune to issues at times either.
Saturday - On Saturday night, I noticed that my wireless home network was down. After troubleshooting, I realized that my Linksys Wireless Router was no longer functioning. I tried many different things and still couldn’t get it to work. I just assumed that it had died as well. So off to the store I went for a new one. After installing, it had the same problem the old one did. I had an Internet connection at my DSL modem, but once it hit both routers, (kaput) So after many more hours, I realized that my PC for some reason wanted nothing to do with my router anymore and I had to run the router though my wife’s PC in the same office. To this day I have no idea why. The service tech in India whose English I couldn’t understand didn’t either.
So after a week of digital misery, I learned some valuable lessons. Don’t become too dependant on your tech, and always know where you can find all of your software installation discs!
Keep Moving Forward!
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