What a day!

What a day!

Yesterday was one of those days!

After the storm earlier that mornng and before I went to work, I noticed that the phone wasn’t working and the Sky planner feature was very slow!

On returning home, things just got worse! The phone still didn’t work, but next doors did. The broadband connection didn’t work, my printer didn’t work (at this time I thought it was broken, on reflection, I wished that was the case and not what was to follow!) and sky was still slow.

I switched USB cable from a different printer, and it worked! Great! Then I noticed the mouse didn’t work!  What with everything else that was happening that day and the uncertainty at work this was the last thing I needed.  Then all USB devices stopped!  I thought, I know, I’ll do the same as I did last time that happened.

So after connecting a serial mouse and rebooting the PC to think about do the fix, it hung on initialising USB controllers. Now I’m concerned.  No USB, means, no internet, if it worked!, no mouse, no upload/download of images, no printing and no backup device. What with a craft fair on Saturday, and visiting a new customer on Sunday, I now must keep some relevent goods back!

I think what has happened is the lightning in the storm has effected the phone lines.  The broadband was connected to the modem and the modem to the PC via USB.  I think the USB controller was fried and on using the PC last night, it just then killed it. It did work though for a while so that is strange. All mains connections are surge protected, so I wasn’t concerned about them.  One worrying thing is the USB connections I think are on the motherboard, I hope it hasn’t effected anything else.

I got sky resolved, turned it off at the wall and back on again. I’m going to try that with the PC as a last attempt, otherwise its a replacement USB card in the hope that that will fix it. How simple a duff printer would have been.

I think the moral here is, as soons as you are woken up in the night by thunder & lightning run to your PC and not only disconnect the mains, but also remember to disconnect any phones or modems, or atleast the connection from the modem to the pc!

One final thing, I have been looking at a new laptop, and did some more research today. So I went to check the Comet website again, and even that seems to have been removed from the website! Now I’m a positive person, but even I have my limits.  I though a new laptop might help solve the usb problem, until I could fix them. One positive thing is that I found out the laptop I was looking at, the 5 in 1 card reader, doesn’t support compact flash, so maybe its telling me not to by that model!!?

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