Heat and computers don’t mix

Anyone who has been in Perth over the last week or so will understand where I’m coming from – for the Australia Day long weekend (ie last weekend) we had a run of reasonably hot days (say around 40 degrees).  Now as most of you will appreciate hot temperatures and computers don’t really go well together.  Unfortunately our house currently has two computers that run pretty much non-stop – we have an SBS server (thanks Wayne for the help in setting this up) and a Vista Media Center.  We also don’t have air conditioning!  Here are just a few of the things that went wrong over the weekend – some of them are computer related, others are just plain frustrating.


SBS – On Saturday the machine hung and needed to be forcibly rebooted.  Since then it seems to be doing silly things like randomly locking accounts.


Vista MCE – Yesterday a whole bunch of updates were downloaded and the machine decided that it was going to automatically reboot.  Now Media Center doesn’t seem to be functioning properly.


Car – Right before the long weekend my car decided that the ignition switch was going to break.  I had already ordered a new key barrel as the key was periodically getting stuck but when the switch went I threw in the towel.  Anyhow the car should be back today and my bank account a little lower.  Thank goodness to the friendly guy from the RAC who opened up the steering column and pulled out the ignition switch so that I could start the car with a screwdriver


Blog – My blog has been performing really badly so earlier this year I made the jump and upgraded the version of community server.  Unfortunately I realised later that of course not only was the database a SQL 2000 db there were also a whole bunch of inconsistencies introduced as part of my poor effort at upgrading.  I decided that I’d better recreate the database – which of course meant I’d loose all my existing posts.  Prior to doing this I used Sql Server Management Studio to do a data export (which was really quick I might add) to a local db.  After recreating the database I then used the import functionality to put all my content back into the new database.  This worked quite successfully until I realised that I was missing like half my posts.  Unfortunately what I didn’t realise (until late last night) was that the import didn’t maintain the correct relationships.  To cut a long story short I then spent a couple of hours sifting through the inner workings of community server working out how the tables relate.  A word of advice:  ALWAYS decide on a naming strategy that makes sense and then stick to it!!!  There seems to be too much going on with the db schema for community server and only half of it seems to make sense – this is a great pity as the product rocks.


Anyhow I’ve hopefully sorted these issues out and will soon be on the road to recovery.  Oh, the other thing was that I repaved my work laptop (Compaq nx8220) and installed Vista.  Vista installed without any issues, detecting and automatically installing correct drivers for everything (nice, really really nice job!!).  The machine is now humming and other than a few complains (like when is Microsoft going to fix Visual Studio and SSMS to work properly under Vista) I am one satisfied customer. 

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