Omaha!

So we headed to Omaha on Sunday to visit a friend of my wife's and her family. It's been nearly a decade since we all got together so it was good that we finally got to go. Plus, we had the new van to transport us. Coincidentally, this friend was having problems with their PC and my wife volunteered my services to help fix it. The friend wanted to call Geek Squad to come out to take a look, but we told her to wait. No sense in dropping $249 if you don't have to.

It was fun to see them. Our boys and their boys got along famously and were basically on autopilot for the 5 hours we visited. They fixed us a great lunch and right after, I got to work on their PC.

It was the B.S.O.D - or Blue Screen of Death. It was some STOP error reporting an "Unmountable Boot Volume". I tried booting into the various safe-modes, tried booting to the command prompt and it always came up with the BSOD. I tried booting to the utility partition of Dell which did work, but didn't have enough time to wait to run all of the hard-disk tests.

I asked for the original disks that come with their Dell system 2 years ago. They had most of them, but not the Windows XP setup CD. That's the one I needed. They had the install CD's for the modem, printer, monitor and others. Just not XP. All I needed was to get a copy of chkdsk.exe and see what it could find.

Fortunately, they called a neighbor who had an XP Home install CD which they would let us borrow. Booting to the CD, I was able to expand chkdsk.exe onto the C drive (curious because I couldn't do a 'dir' or anything else for that matter on the C drive.) Chkdsk reported some errors so I ran it with the /f/r switches and let it go. It got to about 50% rather quickly and then took about 45 minutes to get to around 75% at which point it reset back to 50%.

Kind of like watching paint dry, but it eventually finished.

I rebooted and XP came up perfectly. They had all sorts of problems - their Norton Antivirus hadn't been updated in quite a while, had all sorts of spyware/adware, PC was running very slow. I did all the updates (Norton, Windows), downloaded and ran Ad-Aware, turned off all unnecesary services, uninstalled a bunch of crap that had been downloaded and installed, defragged the C drive, monkeyed with their virtual memory, removed a lot of temp files. After all that a bunch of reboots and a final scandisk and it was working like new.

They were thrilled. I was glad to help them out and even happier they didn't get stuck with a $249 bill from Geek Squad. I should've charged them $200 and we'd both come out ahead, but it's nice to help out. In return, his wife promised that her husband would come over and help frame and sheet-rock our basement when the time comes. That works!

This is the 2nd Dell computer that I've had to deal with very similar hard-drive issues. Both were Maxtor drives.

While I've never personally dealt with Geek Squad, I have heard horror-stories about their service and end-results. Yikes!

So, I got to do the computer-geek thing, my wife got to catch-up with her friend, my kids were worn out by playing with their boys - it was a nice little day-trip.

On the way out of town, we stopped by the Offutt AFB BX and commisary to do some shopping. We get some killer deals on food at the Commisary and occaisionaly score at the BX. If nothing else, shopping at the BX means not having to pay sales-tax! That rocks! That in and of itself would not pay for the 2-hour drive from Des Moines, but since we were in the area, why not? We brought the cooler especially to put the refrigerated items in to keep cool. Worked great.

We tentatively planned to go back later this fall and spend the entire weekend in Omaha - do the Henry Doorly Zoo and a bunch of other things. Can't wait - should be a blast!