Sometimes Murphy Takes Over...

I really dislike it when things that are supposed to make your life easier stop working or start working wonky-ish. For example, Google Desktop Search is something I had gotten used to. It helped me find stuff I needed to find *right away* and had useful links to let me know about news, incoming emails, gmails, etc. All of a sudden a week or so ago, it just stops working. No big error code, no computer blowup. I just booted up the computer and the Google sidebar that I was used to seeing doesn't appear. Five or ten minutes later, the message "Google Search did not startup successfully" appears. Uh. You think? I go searching for non-existant answers, fire off an email to Google, post something in the Google Groups group for Google Desktop and get a great big nothing for the effort. Well, some others chimed in to say that they were having the same problem. After the week or so (and no response of any kind from Google), I sort of got used to not having Google Desktop. Today, I check that post in Google Groups and an official response from Google was there! Woot! The guy asked for four things to be checked. Three of which were no-brainers for me. The fourth "make sure your hard drive is defragmented" sounded unusual but for funs and giggles, I decided to give it a go.

That's where Murphy Law kicked in.

I try to defragment my hard drive and nothing happens. I mean, I push the button, the window sort of freezes for a while, and then it comes back, but obviously nothing happened. By the way, did I mention that I decided to try to fix this right before heading home? Yeah, that was stupid in retrospect. I google for fixes, trying all sorts of things to try to get defrag to run, but nothing works. Oh great. Good timing! So I started a chkdsk /f as I pack up and head home and realize that it's going to take a loooooong time for that thing to run. I ended up taking the laptop home with the lid open and the chkdsk running. I got home placed the laptop in a chair and plugged it in while the chkdsk still ran.

Murphy's Law decided to kick things up a notch, to raise the stakes, if you will.

I go get the mail and find a notice from the IRS placing a lien on *MY* house that came via Certified Mail. No joke. Of course, it's a mistake. But nothing like a notice from the IRS to top of your day. I make the phone call that takes 30 minutes of my life and instructs me of what documentation is needed and all the places that it has to be sent. What fun. What a waste of time.

I ate a quick dinner - meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green bean and corn casserole. Mmmmm. It was good, and I hope I let Christy know I enjoyed it. Back to the laptop, which has just finished booting. I'm guessing the chkdsk went fine, I never saw a results screen so I'm guessing. Now, back to the defrag issue. I recall seeing one "fix" of searching for dfrg* and copying the Service Pack versions into \windows\system32, then re-register defrag's dlls and then re-attempt to defrag. What do you know? That actually worked. That was the good news. The bad news? The hard drive was really, really fragmented. It took nearly four hours to complete.

The Murphy's Law version bad news? I un-installed Google Desktop Search after all that, rebooted, re-installed it and............................. it still didn't work. Bleh. Off I go to let the Google guy know that *that* didn't work for me.

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Looking at these posts, you'd think I complain a lot. Yeesh, I hope I don't. I guess I'm using this blog as my sounding board: Let the steam off here and no one else gets burned...

And now I need to go find that stupid documentation...