I just came back from lunch where I had to diagnose a friend’s seemingly dead computer. This is actually the one I put together for him two weeks ago, so he expected it to work.

I was a bit perplexed at first. No screen response, no mouse/keyboard. Nothing. Restarting only took me to a black screen with a white, non-blinking cursor in the top left corner. After some prayer and patience, I decided to restart it in Safe Mode.

Finally, it showed signs of life.

I got a prompt to Safe Mode with all the options or Normal Mode. I chose Safe Mode with Networking, in case I needed to get on the Internet. It made to the desktop and then restarted back to the “X of X update. Windows will restart when finished.” screen. I now had a possible answer. It looked to me as though his new computer was installing updates and perhaps went to sleep or hibernation. Since he leaves it for long periods of time anyway and this was a new install so it was doubly so (for it to catch up with all the updates since the launch of Vista).

After a bit, I saw the update screen again. It finished and restarted. Now, it wanted to install Vista Service Pack 1. I, of course, obliged.

I left it updating and told him it would take a while to install and configure.

Moral of the story: even updates cannot match the power of sleep.

[Update] Well, it seems that sometimes the easiest things go unnoticed. It was not the update, operating system or anything else I originally checked. Turns out I was overloading the power supply. Even though this the nicest one I have ever used, 500W and complete with removable power cables, I still managed to run too many devices off one cable. Lesson learned.

[Update, Again] It makes me feel better to know that my friend took his machine back to the computer retailer to have a diagnostic. You see, after the last time I “fixed” it, it was still having problems. It made me feel even better when he called to tell me they had to replace both the motherboard and power supply. Since I physically assembled this machine from parts he purchased, I was afraid I did something wrong. But, since it worked for over two (2) weeks, I was holding out hope that I was not at fault.

Moral of the story: no matter how many times you have to install an OS, there will always be one more. I need to reinstall his software now that it is back.