So, today aint was quite a long day, but this was due to the fact that my boss is going on holidays tomorrow for a week and so had to give me something to do. So he went through a small process of exporting filemaker database and importing it into sybase. This is all a part of a larger project which may or may not be done by us. This is more a learning experience about database modelling. Task i was working on yesterday, well the heat dropped off it since the funds and products we were after to make it happen, have made the bosses of the project rethink their plans.
We had very strange problem/s today. Starting from around 10am, a few people started calling us since they randomly dropped out from the network. As each person called we went and checked the switches and everything seemed dandy. Having tested one of the computers which immediately received a valid ip on our network (there are 3 switch rooms in the building and the IT department is a part of another lan). So, it had to me the connection somewhere on their network. The network administrator is still on holidays coming back next week and so it was left to the small guys to fix the problem. All these problem calls came from the same switch. So as told by one of the guys, pull out the power and plug it back it and it worked! I guess no matter what size of business, or what type of equipment, pulling the power and restarting solves everything. I just wouldve thought there might have been a more logical explanation which may have cost the business a lot of money to get a guy in who would’ve just done the same thing really. Guess not.
Later today, a lady came in with her laptop since it was booting “funny”. It actually took 4 minutes to boot, which is considerably a long time and her husband was able to make it boot by telling her to hold down the on button and f1 at the same time. The problem was it wouldn’t boot if you just turned it on. Instead, hitting f1 AFTER you turned on the computer only meant that there was a “Hit f1 to continue” message which means there is something wrong with the bios. Thing is, it wouldnt show this message. So a colleage of mine wanted to defragment the HD. This, to me, did absolutely nothing and i spent some time checking out the laptop. It is an LG LW50. This was when I saw that it was running at 250Mhz!! Its a 1.4Ghz running on batteries, but I wouldve never thought it wouldve dropped the CPU speed to that low. My laptop has only ever dropped down to 600Mhz. Amazing, and this was where I noticed the sticker saying the longest lasting battery/laptop. No wonder. So its been decided that the ladys laptop has HD problems which we simply couldn’t fix today, so she will be bringing it in hopefully tomorrow to have us back up her data before we do anything to it. What scary is that she runs the risk of the computer not booting up again. Not a complete disaster, but scary.
Written by Milton Lai