Laingan.com

The IT guy of my company has finally come to work on my desktop PC today after it has been down for more than a week. I put up a PC helpdesk request last Thursday after I can no longer have the patience to wait for the IT guy to show his mercy. I just have too many things to do and cannot let the PC problem to bog me down.

Last week, before the IT guy came to my rescue, I was trying to fix the PC problem by copying some of the system files from other PC of the same brand and model as mine to replace the corrupted files of my desktop PC. I did this by following the instructions prompted on the screen. Then, the error messages of the missing files (ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll) were gone upon rebooting the PC. 

I was delighted to see the problem had gone and was ready to use my PC to do my work. However, the PC did an auto-shutdown after about 15 minutes. The system went to the CHKDSK (checkdisk) mode automatically upon powering up. It showed some bad clusters and unreadable security descriptor error messages. I also heard some “act-act” noise quite frequently. After seeing the error messages and hearing the funny noise, my colleague advised me to get a new harddisk in case the old HDD has too many bad sectors which may be beyond repair. 

So, I went to Sim Lim Square to purchase a new 80GB SATA HDD and some SATA-related accessories after work. It costs about SGD $65. I think the price is quite reasonable as compared with the price of an IDE HDD a few years back. This just shows that the price of HDD has really eroded drastically over the years. 

I removed the old HDD and then installed it as a slave drive to my colleague’s PC to do a CHKDSK, virus scan and data backup on my own. After seeing what I had done, a colleague of mine told me that I seem to be more like an IT guy than the real IT guy in our IT department. Hmm….I cannot agree more with what he had said.

I installed the newly-purchased 80GB SATA HDD to my desktop PC and then passed it to the IT guy to do a system recovery and setup for me. After this incident, all I can say is that it can be very stressful and frustrating to have had encountered a PC problem.  Now, I’m glad that my PC is up. I can do my work, check my emails, surf Internet and so on as usual.