1 - (Saturday) My CAD computer crashes. Literally. My 6 year old daughter knocked it over. It didn't fall, it just tipped over while it was running. In retrospect, it probably wasn't damaged, but one thing led to another while I was inspecting the hardware and operation, and I screwed it up to the point of having to "system restore" and reinstall everything. Takes me about 5 days to get everything back the way I had it.
2 - (Tuesday) My Ranger keyboard goes bad. Actually, this started about a year ago, but it was two keys I didn't need (ALT and Shift) that stopped working. This week, 6 new keys stopped working, including 0 and 1. Sent if off to Hayes Instrument on Thursday to get a new keyboard.
3 - (Wednesday) My Trimble 360 prism slips out of my hands while screwing it onto the rod and it falls onto a concrete driveway. It's not flashing and the instrument won't track it. I finish the job with the "brick" prism trying to keep it pointed at the gun as I walk around. I get it home and notice it's rattling. I take it apart and find a piece has fallen off the circuit board. I take it to a little electronic repair shop down the street and they solder it back on for $10. Thankfully, it's back to working.
I'm still having some residual effects. I'm using my back-up DC, which very well may be the first Ranger ever made. I can't find any way to download my data. Active Sync 4.5 says it's too old, the older versions of Active sync won't install in new vesions of Windows, my computer has no COM ports to work with TDS Survey Link, and TDS Survey Link won't recognize USB to Serial adaptors ...
I spent 4 hours last night trying to figure out HyperTerminal or some other means of directly conecting a Ranger to Windows ... no luck as of yet.
It's Sunday now, hoping for a better week.
Viva Las Vegas!
I hate it when that happens especially the wondering of what is coming next.:-)
I know what you mean. My Trimble 5603 is doing everything it's supposed to, except on occasion it will not measure the distance. Call in tech, he say's "Hmm, sounds like the distance meter circuit board." Me, "Ah, about how much?" Him, "About $1600". Ouch. That wasn't in the budget this month (or year). Does that mean I have 2 more bad things coming?
When I bought my computer, quite a while ago now, I installed a COM port card in one of the slots to run Survey Link.
Does this mean that after being divorced twice one should never go in search of number three?
Statistically, yes. Statistically 87% third marriages end in divorce, and fourth marriages 94% failure rate.
> I screwed it up to the point of having to "system restore" and reinstall everything.
System restore just loads up windows settings of a previous date that does not include executable programs that were loaded in after that date. For your case I would think the previous day or two before the CPU got knocked over would have been sufficient.
So why would you need to reinstall everything?
> > I screwed it up to the point of having to "system restore" and reinstall everything.
>
> System restore just loads up windows settings of a previous date that does not include executable programs that were loaded in after that date. For your case I would think the previous day or two before the CPU got knocked over would have been sufficient.
>
> So why would you need to reinstall everything?
Actually, there are two different "restores" on HPs. There's the Windows version that restores your settings back to a previous "checkpoint", which I really like.
However, HPs have their own system restore which reloads windows from a recovery partition of the harddrive. It's sort of the final option system restore. All the data files remained, it just overwrote windows.
My pencil has yet to run out of battery power!:-D
Luddite from North Aboyne
