More tech troubles
On Thursday, my phone line went out again, and the Internet went dead less than half an hour later. I made an appointment for a tech to come on Friday, but of course they never showed up; there aren’t enough techs trained in the old copper phone lines, so they never arrive on time. Which means I’ve been wi-fi-less over the weekend, relying on my phone for Internet. I’m now on wi-fi at the library. I was planning to watch a show here, but the resolution is too low to be worth it. Odd, since I’ve been able to watch video here before. But there are four other people on laptops along with me, so maybe that’s why.
Anyway, with nothing to do on my mini-PC but write, I’ve let it lie idle a lot, and I’ve discovered that the thing causing it to shut down after a period of inactivity is not the hard drive deactivation, since I had that set for 5 hours and it shut down after not quite an hour of inactivity. To clarify, this is the kind of “shutdown” where the power light is on but the screen is dark and the computer doesn’t respond to anything. Last time, I had to unplug it to reboot it. Since then, I realized there’s a recessed reset button you can trip with a paper clip. I tried letting the computer sit on sleep mode for a couple of hours, but it went from sleep mode to the unresponsive mode! So that happened twice in one day.
I have a suspicion now that it starts out with that unresponsive mode, then after a while it self-reboots. That seems more likely than it doing two different kinds of shutdown. But I didn’t want to let it sit in the unresponsive mode and wait to see what happened.
The best option I can think of is just to shorten the time before it hibernates automatically, to less than the time it takes before it freezes. But I’m not certain how long that is. I’m pretty sure it took longer in sleep mode than in active mode. Anyway, I habitually left my laptop on all day because it’s so slow getting started and closing down, but this computer goes on and off so quickly that there’s no reason not to sleep or hibernate it when I’m away.
Still, I wish I could diagnose the problem and fix it, rather than just trying to avoid it.
Anyway, when I reached the library, the road to its parking lot was blocked by a police car, since apparently there’s a crime scene nearby. I parked in Burnet Woods across the way to investigate, but I wasn’t sure if it was okay to park there while going to the library, so I walked around the block to see if there was a way to approach from the other side. I should’ve just looked up the map on my phone, since it was a considerably longer walk than I expected, but I did find another way in.
I hope the phone/internet repair person comes tomorrow. On the plus side, the building manager says we will be getting an upgrade to fiber optics soon. I hope it’s very soon, and this is the last time I have to deal with these frequent outages.
