Honey, I Blew Up the Computer

Okay, I didn't literally blow it up, but it sure seemed like it. My computer at work has been giving me fits for the last 2 weeks. It takes so long to boot up in the morning and it just grinds and grinds. This morning it took nearly 10 minutes for it to boot up and for me to get clocked in. I couldn't take it any longer so I put in a work request on it this morning. A tech came in less than an hour and started working on it. He was checking this and that and even started a defrag and it was taking a very long time. He checked the McAfee Antivirus files and found a lot of quarantined files. It is setup to remove them routinely but for some unknown reason it was not doing that. He started removing them and there were nearly 24,000 quarantined items going back from the very beginning of when I got the computer (probably 3 to 4 years). It took several hours for all those files to be removed. He still has some work to do on the computer, but it is running a lot better now. He was going to come back late in the afternoon on Friday and work on it more. He decided to work on it late so it doesn't disrupt my work that much.

Course, I really don't want to go to work on Friday. I just want to stay home all snuggled up in blankets. It is so blasted cold. Today's high was -4F. Tonight is going to be nearly -20F, right now it's -10F. I'm thankful that I'm not living up North, it's cold enough here. Luckily it will start warming up some tomorrow.

UPDATE 2/2/2009: I continued having problems and would have to restart at least once a day, sometimes three times. The tech kept checking back with me to see how it was running unless I had contacted him. One day, while checking on something else, I came across the 'quarantine' folder and decided to check it out and was so surprised to find over 49,000 quarantined files that date back to 12/4/2008. I mentioned this to the tech and he was checking it out. I kept telling him that the hard drive was going bad. My computer is scheduled to be replaced in October 2009 so they are waiting until then. The decision was to add more memory. WHAT? Okay. While he was waiting for some process to finish to install the memory, he announced that the hard drive was definitely going out and gave it a month before going out completely. That means another 3 weeks. We'll see.....