Don’t believe the hype. Just as soon as you get an unofficial title of “expert” with your friends and family, they will throw you for a loop. I was sitting at my desk when I received a phone call from a friend. I should feel proud that he values my opinions more than his IT department, but not this time.
About a second later my inbox beeped and the following picture showed up.
I was in the middle of dealing with restful web development and couldn’t get my head around the error.
Daniel What does this mean?
Me Difficult to say, what happened?
Daniel I don’t know.
Me Did you install anything?
Daniel No, well, I don’t think so
Me Did anything change?
Daniel No ….
We did speak a bit longer but I couldn’t get any sense of the situation and suggested he speak with IT.
After work, did a bit more checking, there are a couple of possible reasons.
- Incorrect memory type for that computer
- Possible buggy version of BIOS (that was just installed)
- Some other hardware problem
It could be any of these, but without more information it is not possible to get more specific. If you were installing new hardware or adding more memory that might be a clue. Another clue might be that your computer is having problems with the hardware that perviously either always existed (always left on) or never existed until after the boot (always off).
My mentor suggested that perhaps it was a problem with the CMOS battery and some of the settings may have gotten lost.
What is POST? Power On Self Test.
What was the problem? I guess I will never know, I simply heard that IT was working on the machine for quite a while and then left without saying a word.
