Spent my Saturday trying to fix bro-in-law's PC, had lunch @ Pizza Hut & talking abt winter in US. Nice fellowship with sis & bro-in-law :-)

The day started late because I woke up abt 10.30am. Had a quick breakfast & chat with 3rd sister. Then I'm off to 1st sister's house across the Klang bridge.

Saved some Windows XP articles in my thumbdrive the day before. Alas, the simple ACPI fix didn't work on my bro-in-law's PC :-( So, he decided to backup important files into a thumbdrive. Since he doesn't have a high capacity one, we had to go shopping.

We had lunch at Pizza Hut. Tried the new crunchy pizza with prawns on it. It was indeed crunchy as advertised & tasty. We noticed there was a girl outside carrying a huge cardboard on her back to promote the crunchy pizza. Wonder how much the girl is getting? Gotta admire her courage & thick skin :-)

After lunch, we went to see some winter apparel. Talked about how cold US will be at this time, especially New York City. Since my bro-in-law stayed during the winter in a few countries, he knows what's important and what isn't. Why all this talk about winter? Well, that's a story for later ;-)

My bro-in-law bought a Transcend 4GB thumbdrive, which unfortunately didn't work on his PC. But it work flawlessly on his laptop. I certainly didn't see this coming but I guess it happens on older PCs, especially when using Safe Mode.

Took some time to backup the data into a different thumbdrive (Bro-in-law found a 4GB Kingston in his pencil case). I tried to repair Windows but met with the same result. You see, the PC would startup until the login screen and then the monitor mysteriously goes to sleep. I was puzzled. Safe Mode works and Event Viewer showed many ACPI errors.

So, I tried the advice I got from another article: Choose Standard PC during fresh install. That didn't work either. I concluded that some hardware is faulty but I can't pinpoint which one. Don't really want to spend more time to find out. Instead, I offered my old PC to my bro-in-law which still works well but it's currently running Linux (Will change to Windows). I'll also transfer his existing hard disk into my PC. Came back home at 7.30pm. Going out for dinner later.

The picture below shows how hungry we were during lunch. Couldn't think of taking a picture before we ate the pizza! :-D

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Xander Harris

Xander Harris


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