In the two and a half years that I have been at my current engagement I have had surprisingly few problems with my workstation. Microsoft Windows is often maligned but XP has proved to be a stable platform for me. Or at least until this morning.
Upon arriving at work today I was greeted with a blank, black screen and a small white underscore cursor blinking merrily away in the upper left corner of the display. Control-Alt-Delete had no effect, neither did powering the machine off and restarting it. A quick call to the help desk resulted in an over the phone diagnoses that my hard drive had died.
Within an hour the technician had come, tested all the external connections, re-seated the cards and memory, and, when all of that failed to restore the machine, taken the hard drive away for diagnostics elsewhere. By mid-morning he had returned with a new drive, freshly loaded with the standard set of developer software. Fortunately the client has a policy of keeping the “My Documents” folder on a network drive, so I didn’t lose any of my files. And the tech was able to access the drive contents and copied some settings files and my email archive to the network for me.
That my workstation croaked just three days shy of my last day at this site is ironic I suppose. I’m adjusting desktop settings, reapplying configurations, and updating the base software to the levels I had yesterday - all activities I’ll be repeating to one degree or another next week at my new job.
