The Blog of Harald

In Marshall Brain’s Blog, we see that Marshall spent 11 hours and 20 minutes fixing and dealing with computer problems in the month of December. I remember reading this and thinking that it sounded about normal.

Today, I went downstairs to discover my old laptop had blue-screened. It turns out that there’s a bad block in the _directory_ WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG. Now the system cannot boot. (The brain-dead recovery process on the Win2K install disk can’t fix this, because this is apparently the directory it looks for when locating a system to repair :-)

Fortunately, I was planning on scraping that system anyway; the cable connecting the screen to the base has an intermittent fault, and the power switch is broken. I was going to take it back to Acer to get those fixed, then re-install. So I had most of my important data backed up already.

But the one thing I was still using that computer for was Quicken…

I tried installing Quicken on a different computer today, but it wouldn’t go. My guess is that I’m triggering anti-piracy code; activation requires connecting to a license server on the Internet, which is probably refusing to activate because those codes are already in use on another system. Of course, Intuit’s tech support is closed on Sundays…

If this continues, I’ll be over 11:20 by the end of the month :-) But I have to agree with Marshall; why does it always have to be this difficult?