I am currently typing this post from my fresh, OS-reinstalled Dell Inspiron laptop.  For those who have been lucky and/or smart enough to never have their hard drive crash, let me recount my story.  It all started last Friday night (8/22) when I was surfing the web (trying to scout out good places to get furniture for my new apartment, which by the way, is so nice) when I got a boot virus on my computer that caused the dreaded blue screen of death.

Being the diligent, somewhat tech-savvy MIT student, I had anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and kept regular updates and scans, but being the lazy, graduate student, I had neglected to backup most of my files.  And since I could not start the machine in safe mode, I was pretty annoyed at the thought of losing all my files.

Anyway, I have dealt with other students trying to help me resolve computer issues before, whether at Rice in the form of student computing consultants or at MIT with residential computing consultants, and I have to admit, I have been less-than-astounded at the help provided, which was usually in the form of letting my ticket (with the problem noted, including any error codes or messages) sit in queue for a few weeks, then when they finally make an appointment, asking me what is wrong, looking at my laptop for about five to ten minutes, then telling me “I don’t know what’s wrong”, often accompanied by “you can try to reinstall Windows”.  At Rice, I eventually stopped going to student IT workers altogether, some of whom I would not trust to even touch my computer.

But hey, I figure I would at least try out MIT’s computing help desk since I am paying for it, and to my pleasant surprise, my phone call was answered by an actual human being within a minute or two, and I got an in-person appointment the very same day.  A full-time staffer helped me out, confirmed my suspicion that this time, it really would be easier to reinstall the OS, and I made a quick trip over to MicroCenter (finally got to see west side of campus) for the necessary adapter.  Anyway, long story short (or at least shorter), I ended up making three more trips to the help desk (drive not recognized, hardware diagnostics, laptop pickup), and eventually recognized how much of an idiot I was for not removing my hdd password before trying to access it externally (leave it to me to overlook the obvious).  A couple of hours of CD/DVD burning and an OS reinstall later, I can finally get back online at my apartment (a big deal since the cable has decided to go down, limiting my sources of entertainment).

You know how they say that a cell phone is like an extra arm to some people?  I think that’s how it is for me and computers, so losing mine for pretty much a week was really aggravating.  On the upside, this happened before classes start next week (meaning that I really should pick out my classes).  Plus, I have encountered some “my computer doesn’t work - fix it” people lately, so I have a better understanding of the kind of gruff that IT workers have to face.  Combine that with the fast response time and knowledgeable (full-time) staffers at the computing help desk means that I now have much more respect for MIT IST… well, until I went to New Ashdown and saw that they had a wireless router every hundred feet but no cellular repeaters, which might explain the strong wireless signal and the almost complete lack of cellular reception in that building.