Archive for November 20th, 2008

To sleep, perchance to hibernate

Grandad November 20th, 2008

I hope yiz are not sitting around waiting for some great pearl of wisdom from Grandad today?

I’m busy, and don’t have time for this kind of nonsense.

You see, I have a bit of a problem here.

Many years ago, a bloke built a computer for me.  It was a huge yoke and for it’s time, it was top of the range.  Of course, time has moved on and my laptop is more powerful than the old PC.

Nevertheless, the old desktop machine has its uses.  It sits there in my office humming away.  I leave the kettle on top of it to keep the water hot.  I toast sandwiches in the CD drive occasionally.

I can’t switch it off, because the printer is attached to it.  [They deny any kind of relationship, but I know they are very attached].  Also, I use it as file storage, because it has half a terrabyte of storage [or that’s what the bloke told me when he built it].

Like myself, it is getting old.  It used to have a great sound system that could make dogs howl half a mile away, but the sound card went up in smoke.  I can live with that.

Now it has started to do strange things.

For a start, I can’t put it to sleep.I’m not trying to euthanise it – I just want to be able to depower it without losing everything.

Normally, I would just click on Stand By or Hibernate, but those options don’t exist any more.  I don’t know where they went.  I looked on the floor underneath, but there is no sign of them anywhere.

I’m trying to fix it now. 

I took a copy of the button on my laptop, and pasted it onto the screen of the old PC.  That doesn’t work.

I have tried talking nicely to it.

I have tried being assertive with it.

I tried reading Winnie the Pooh to it, because that used to send our K8 to sleep.

I had a look in Google and it suggested something about restoring the PC to an earlier time, so I put the clock back by a year.  Now it just complains that the time is wrong.

Frankly, I’m getting a bit annoyed with it.

And if I do get it fixed, I am having problems with my little network.

The network says Herself doesn’t exist.

Maybe I won’t bother fixing that?