Remember the saga of my crashed computer?  When I got the machine back it would not boot up so I took it back to the repair shop.  I got my machine back from the shop the following Monday or Tuesday. My local geek told me the PC booted up just fine at their shop. They tested everything again and found nothing that could have caused the problems I was having.

“It has to be one of your peripherals that is causing the problem. Reconnect each and every device, one by one until you find the device that’s causing the problem.”

Well OK then. But since I had work to do I left this for a weekend project.

Two nights ago I finally reconnected the final two pieces of equipment and discovered my machine would not boot up. Eying my external back up drive with great suspicion, I disconnected it and powered down. Guess what? My PC now works but you can forgeddabout starting the computer with the external drive attached. It’s not gonna happen.

So at the end of the day I had two different things crashing my computer. The first was diagnosed by me and fixed off site. Seems the Spybot Search and Destroy was preventing my newly installed Webroot virus program from starting up. Disabling the software from executing at Windows start up solved that. But the moral of this story is the fact that my local geek diagnosed my second problem but couldn’t fix it. They don’t make house calls. I ended up solving and fixing the second problem myself.

Here is the take home message:

My computer was down for a total of two calendar weeks. There is more to managing remote underwriters than meets the eye. What are your company’s plans and procedures to resolve remote technology issues?

Yeah…I thought so.