The blinking cursor dealio probably only happened when you had removable storage inserted. Dells do this flashy dash when they’re trying boot to USB flash media that isn’t bootable. By default your Dell system is set to boot to removable over SATA. I’ve seen computers even try to boot to a USB printer with built in SD card readers, resulting in this very flashy dash scare. Unplugging the printer and Ctr+Alt+Del got everything back in order. Disabling boot to USB media is the permanent fix.

Sorry if you’ve already explored this possibility and I’m wrong/wasting your time. Also, long time reader, first time comment. I enjoy your work very much.

lol windows.. Yeah Idk because closed source operations kind of disallow for community problem solving. Ironic eh?

Luke Maciak wrote:

What do you suggest for incremental backups? Powers that be don’t trust anything cloud based so stuff like Mozy is out. Most of the affected machines are laptops with a single hd, and they don’t always have internet access either (the clients don’t always give our analysts access to their interwebs).

No idea what to use on windows. There must be some fancy commercial packages that does all you want and more, right? But perhaps you could whip something together with just an rsync binary and a bat-script in the scheduler. Not sure if security measures in modern Windows versions will get in the way.

Note that for both the backup uses we discussed here you technically do not need backup to another machine. All you actually need is backup to local storage, so you can pull out older versions of files. On the other hand, when setting up backups, it may be a good idea to to it right :)…

Is Norton Ghost still any good? I think the newer versions had a real-time backup feature. I used to use Ghost 2003 to do imaging back in the date, but since I switched over to clonezilla. Both do a full disk images, but you can’t be using the machine while it is backing up.

No idea. All I know is people who regularly used older versions of ghost to backup their own systems, but no one who used it for automatic backups.

@ MrJones:

LOL. That’s exactly what I did – for months, until I finally got a new gaming rig together. But sometimes a random power outage or brownout would shut it down for me. Booting up from that was always scary ordeal.

@ Eric:

Wow… Modem bug-outs affecting the UI… One has to wonder how deeply do they need to dig in the OS entrails to actually make that modem work then.

@ Tino:

What do you suggest for incremental backups? Powers that be don’t trust anything cloud based so stuff like Mozy is out. Most of the affected machines are laptops with a single hd, and they don’t always have internet access either (the clients don’t always give our analysts access to their interwebs).

Is Norton Ghost still any good? I think the newer versions had a real-time backup feature. I used to use Ghost 2003 to do imaging back in the date, but since I switched over to clonezilla. Both do a full disk images, but you can’t be using the machine while it is backing up.

When these things happen, they literally drive me crazy. I cannot let go until I understand what was the underlying cause.

But why not try a game of “have you tried it?” with your first mystery issue.

My suggestion is to first make sure it is absolutely independent of hardware: take two machines from the same batch, one with the problem and the other without it. Switch hard drives and try. And then, also try to re-imagine the two hard drives with each other’s image, and try again. Who knows, it could be some truly weird timing issue when writing files. Don’t ever count out hardware until you have tried everything.

Once you have established that it is purely software, setup some of your users with full incremental backups of the complete system, preferably every hour… Once the issue hits a user, walk back through the backups until it works again. Try to find out what happened at that point in time.

Coincidently, I think hourly incremental backups could be a solution to your second problem as well. When a user comes with his broken Excel sheet, pull up the last working version from backups and say “this time, start with cleaning up this thing, or the same thing will happen again”.

I do have an interesting hardware/driver based bug on my laptop that can become annoying and which I have found no way of solving.
Using a HP tx2 tablet with an ExpressCard UMTS Modem it all works fine, as long I am in reach of UMTS – when it falls back to GSM every few seconds the mouse cursor fades away and can only be brought back by tapping the screen

My workplace loves ‘the cloud’. Wouldn’t be so bad, except that we use all sorts of different stuff in ‘the cloud’ and it’s not easy to remember which services we use…

difficult problems need simple solutions. dont switch off your pc

@ Victoria:

Yes. They always, always, always break in unexpected ways. Usually what you can do is to put the cursor on the item that is broken, backspace until it gets joined to the previous item, then hit enter once and indent as appropriate. It does not always work though – especially if something went wrong up above as well.

@ Mart:

Tell me about it. My company uses Zimbra for email. It has a very robust calendaring solution that integrates with Outlook. Do we use it? No, of course not. All scheduling is done in a single excel file that is only accessible to select chosen few individuals in the “inner sanctum”. Assignments are manually emailed to each individual at the beginning of the week. There are currently no plans to change this. :P

One of my tech leads (!) at a previous job created a personal calendar for just our team to use. Of course, it had to be a manually formatted shared Excel sheet in a shared location, which is a Win XP box, used by other teams as well.

Naturally, we hit the 10 connections limit pretty quick. And when the month rolled over, he tasked a team member to “cut and paste” the format for the next month. D’oh!