Dust Storm.org

First of all, I know I haven’t blogged in a while, no this isn’t a video blog, and yes, I’m OK. I’ve just been living under a rock for the past few weeks. It was a nice rock.

Right now I’m living in Falls Church, Virginia for a summer internship housed up in Skyline Towers. The staff here is really great and the room is very sizable compared to the floor plan I looked at online before putting down the initial payment. My roommate just got in this weekend, and he’s a pretty cool dude from Arizona State. Only weird thing about the apartment is some random switches that go to certain outlets in the walls, but other than that, love it.

So I have already been here for a little more than a week, and I had not defragmented my computer in quite some time, so I started it to run overnight. This was the night before Memorial Day. I went into my bedroom to go to sleep and about 10 minutes later, I hear this beeping noise. At first I thought it might have been the neighbors, cause they had been playing music for the last few nights. No worries I thought, until I realized which direction it was coming from: the opposite direction of my neighbors. I go out to the living room of my apartment, and the lights from my computer aren’t on. By this time the beeping had stopped and I still didn’t know where it came from. Turns out it was my battery backup that was beeping, signaling it was dead. The fact that it died while my computer was defragmenting was an unsettling fact as well. I tried to turn the UPS back on, to no avail since my other power strip was till active: didn’t work, so I plugged my UPS into the socket my power strip was in and it started working. Next was to turn on my computer and assess the damage. Luckily it booted just fine, so I turned it off and went to bed to address it in the morning.

So after my mattress decided to spring a leak in the middle of the night, I booted up my computer and logged in, but I got a lot of program memory access errors. Many of my startup programs failed to load, and I couldn’t get other programs to run, not even Internet Exploder. So at this point, I’m thinking that there must have been some files that got corrupted in the degragmentation that caused these programs not to start. My first thought was to back everything up, reinstall some programs to recover program data, like firefox bookmarks and such, and nuke the system. So I download a couple of installers from my Netbook, since I couldn’t open a web browser to download anything on my desktop, and put them onto a memory stick to transfer. When I went to install the programs, I got an error that basically said it couldn’t load the windows installer. At this point, I’m starting to think that I’m pretty much at a loss and will have to make an image backup of my OS drive. So I try a System Restore while trying to find a solution to the Windows installer problem. Just like everything else, System Restore did not work. Panicking at this point, I find something that I have used before: sfc /scannow. For those who don’t know what that is, “SFC” stands for System File Checker and it checks the integrity of core Windows System files, similar to how Startup Repair from an Installation CD checks startup files required to boot. Luckily, SFC found errors, rebooted and fixed the problem.

Now here’s the kicker of the story. I purposefully talked a little bit about my apartment above for this reason. After I got my computer fixed, I went around to see what other outlets might have died. Turns out that only the top ones of the three closest outlets were dead. So I find another outlet to plug in my power strip to get it working and figured I’d submit a maintenance request later. This was Memorial Day. So yesterday, Tuesday, I was walking around and saw a switch on the wall that my computer desk was set up against. I know it didn’t lead to any lights in the apartment, like the ones in the bedrooms: and then it hit me. I turned the switch on and plugged my phone charger into the top socket of one of the plugs: it started charging. I turned the switch off: it stopped charging. I managed to almost kill my computer by turning off a switch I thought was to the hallway light. I probably turned that one off and turned the actual hall light switch off and didn’t even realize it. So now I have an aptly named “Kill Switch” in my apartment, and I’m never using those outlets for anything essential while I’m here.