Baltimoremick.com

Some technical difficulties are afoot in Stately Thomas Manor.

• Last night, my venerable first generation Dell DJ had some problems when I started to place some podcasts on it in preparation for my commute to work and hitting the gym.  I decided to boot it into its own diagnostic mode and let it run a scan disk overnight.  When I looked at it this morning, the problem continued.  I would “move” music to it, but the music never made it to the device.  My lone recourse was to format the disk, losing all data on it.  Fortunately, my music has loaded on it just fine, and I have my music stashed away somewhere safe.
• Apparently, I am not the only one whose home machine has decided to just not play nice.  My home workstation–an aged Athlon XP+–decided to suffer a rare blue screen on me last night and crashed.  I left it alone, and I decided to reboot it this morning.  When I did so, the machine would not even get to the motherboard posting.  My thinking is the motherboard and its bulging capacitor problem finally resulted in its demise.  I don’t hear any bad sounds emanating from it, but I am going to get some type of external drive connector so that I can grab data from my old PATA drive in the machine.  I am pretty confident that the drive is not bad, but I figure I will be safe rather than sorry.  If the machine is finally toast, then the question becomes do I build a new one or do I just get a desktop from Dell and port my data to it.

Sometimes, my work is never done.