Jun 28, 2011

Obituary for MT-pc

A month ago, my office computer had a peaceful death. It was suffering from a problem unknown even to the manufacturer right from its birth. My office pc, which I nicked as MT-pc (after MeghaTropiques, ISRO's ambitious project for improving the rainfall estimation, and not empty pc) endured a lot since it was put to use.

The doctor did his best to find the issue and improve the health of MT. He transplanted various organs, serviced some, replaced others with new, but the issue still remained. He even tried the heart transplant, but of no use. MT did not show much of the symptoms, unlike other computers. It did not hang, crash or freeze. It showed only one symptom every time it suffered a blow, it simply restarted.

We shifted MT from one hospital to another, but there was no specialist available to find and resolve the issue. And then, one fine day, about a month ago, when I was in the middle of the work of an ambitious project, MT had a severe setback. It turned off as usual to restart, but did not start again!

I now realize that I should have talked to MT one last time before it breathed last. There is no way to enter its brain now! Fortunately, it has made quite a few friends from whom I was able to talk and recover some of the precious data it had stored all along.

May its soul rest in peace!

Aftermath:
A better companion, Dell Optiplex 990, has replaced my MT now. It did show some issue at first that it did not detect the network interface card, a necessary hardware that enables a computer to connect to the Internet. I had installed Ubuntu Lucid version then, however, the model is released only recently from Dell. Natty, the latest release from Ubuntu solved the issue and now all the vital parameters of my computer are stable.

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