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Blue Screen of Death
Anyone that has ever experienced the dreaded blue screen of death
(BSoD) on his or her computer knows what a painful experience it can
be. I can proudly say that I've experienced it on both my home and work
computers in the last 24 hours, and in each case, was able to bring
them back from the dead.
If you're like me, you're probably
thinking that it might be nice to know how to fix this problem, but is
it really worthy of occupying space on a corporate blog? Well, the
reason I chose this topic is because my solution ultimately came from
the place I spend 100% of my work day thinking about -- community. It
just took a little "wheel spinning" to finally realize that the answer
was right in front of my nose.
Without getting into the gory
details, I will tell you that I am fairly technologically savy, at
least more so than the average Joe. As I mentioned in my virgin blog post,
I grew up around computers. So when my wife showed me the BSoD last
night on our home computer and said "Honey, what's wrong with the
computer?", I wasn't that concerned.
After rebooting a dozen
times and trying to start up in "safe" mode, I started to think that
maybe I wasn't so clever. It wasn't a huge deal either way because we
had been thinking about retiring our Dell Inspiron, just not quite this
early. I tried running a few diagnostics before going to bed but the
fact that I couldn't get the computer to boot up really nagged at me.
I'm not one to give up easily so I was bothered by my apparent defeat.
That's when it dawned on me -- use my other computer to look up the
problem on Google.
Within 30 seconds, I found the answer to my
issue in a "tech support" community. Sometimes the answers in these
online forums can be sketchy but this answer was crystal clear. I did
exactly what the 25 word post told me to do and it worked like a charm.
I'm just sad that I wasn't able to personally thank this person for
saving me endless hours troubleshooting, not to mention having to buy a
new laptop a couple of months sooner than I had anticipated.
So,
next time you have a problem, any problem, give a community a shot. I
should know better but sometimes old habits die hard. And to the person
who saved me all that time and money, "THANK YOU".
Sat, Sep 09 2006
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