Dependent so much

At the point when hardware fails to function you know what you miss. It’s not just the backup. You loose precious time. From one of my customers I got a company notebook to be able to work in his corporate intranet and access all needed servers. Without it I can develop with pen and paper. This notebook is a HP/Compaq NC8000 with Win2000 on it- it worked very reliably over the last years. On Monday I put it into standby mode. When I tried to start it yesterday the fan was on for about 10 seconds, the LED with the flash symbol came up (I never saw this one, I thought it was broken :) ) and nothing more happened. Just imagin a deadline within the next 3 days and you know about my feelings. I removed the battery and tried various combinations to breath live back into this dead piece of silicon and plastic. Nothing worked. So in a very sad mood I went to the technicians of that company. They repeated the exact same sequence of trial starts- with battery only, with battery and wire and finally wire only. This one brought it back to life! That’s unfair, I thought. I felt a bit stupid. But anyway, I was very happy to be able to continue my work. Until today. While in a VM Player session and hacking some fancy perl stuff suddenly the display went black and nothing happened anymore. Same as yesterday. With the exception that I did not yet get the machine back to life. So I’m blogging… I try again tonight, maybe it’s a temperature problem. Or maybe a disk thing? All I hope is to get my data back. And of course there is no backup for desktop clients within that corporate intranet. For our own machines we use bacula to backup Windows clients as well as Linux servers. This works great. But only for our machines :( I wish you a great day anyway!