Once devoted, now perfidious
I’ve been really happy with our public computer setup for a while now. We went from heavily locked down Windows 2000 machines, some of which were old and clunky on top of being on an antiquated operating system, to Windows XP machines that better mirror a normal computing environment with features (including Deep Freeze) that prevent anyone from breaking them.
About three weeks ago, one of the computers in our Computer Lab started acting a little funny. It was just the one computer, and since not every patron reports a problem with a computer (most likely for fear of being blamed for the problem), we don’t know how long it was happening before that, if at all.
The monitor would just turn off in the middle of work, and not turn back on again. The computer would stay on, and no amount of wiggling the mouse, turning the monitor off and on again, or tapping the keyboard keys would do anything. I tried to shut down the computer using a key sequence (if you hit the Windows button on the keyboard, then hit U and U again, provided there isn’t anything in your start menu that also starts with U, you can actually shut down your machine), the using Control-Alt-Delete (something I try only in bad situations), but neither worked.
Ultimately, I had to resort to the most awful solution: holding down the power button on the computer for 10 seconds until the machine powered itself down, and then pushing the power button again to turn it back on, a tactic that really shouldn’t be used unless all else fails.
The machine came back up, and the monitor worked fine. However, given any indiscriminate period of time, the problem would happen again. From what we could tell, and from what patrons told us, there didn’t seem to be anything obvious that caused this cute little problem. With just one machine exhibiting the problem, we figured we had 5 other computers in the lab (plus the 2 in the reference room, 1 in the business center, and 4 kiosk machines for basic web) to tide us over while we brought the infidel back into the fold of functioning public terminals.
Then the others started to follow suit. The 4 other Dell Optiplex 270s in the Computer Lab starting turning against us, a nearly full-scale technology mutiny. All except the 1 Dell Optiplex 280 seemed to be immune to this little quirk.
To our knowledge, there is a known hardware problem with some of the capacitors on the motherboards in the 270s, so, in a way, they can’t be blamed for the madness. However, that problem generally causes the entire computer to turn off spontaneously, not the monitors. At first I ventured a guess that it was the video card that was the issue, since I tested the computers with a brand new LCD monitor which had no positive effect on the issue (and ruled out the dying monitor theory, which was my very first guess). But, since we’ve since found that the issue can be recreated by browsing through directories (folders) on the computer, the new guess is that it’s not the video card, but still something either a) hardware in nature, or b) related to a recent Windows update that could be conflicting with hardware drivers.
Or something.
The latest news is that our town tech support has ordered hardware replacements from Dell (in accordance with our warranty contract) for the machines, but due to the part-time nature of my position, the fact that town tech support is 2 people with barely enough time to email updates, and the fact that my boss is on vacation this week, I don’t have all the details quite yet. We’re hoping the hardware replacements will fix the problem very soon.
All this to explain that this one computer issue has pretty much preempted a good deal of my other work for the past several weeks. (And, for those of you who have never been party to this kind of troubleshooting, hopefully this gives you a helpful inside look.) It’s been keeping me pretty busy on several different fronts, from hands-on troubleshooting to communicating with various forms of tech support to explaining the issue to staff, and determining how to explain it to patrons. Not to mention the stress of having a substantial library service, for all intents and purposes, not available. However, everyone has been working as a team, which makes it all a bit easier.
All the same, it’s pretty big, and has required many deep, cleansing breaths.
Tags: work
