Posted by So there I am. Sitting at Perth airport. My flight from Perth to Sydney, the first leg on my trip to OpenWorld 2017 is delayed. Of course, delays are not unusual and do not normally bother me. Because I can just flip open my laptop, knock off a few AskTOM questions while I wait.
But not this time. I press the Power button and I get this:
That is the first time I’ve ever seen that on my nice Dell XPS 13 laptop, but I figure “No big drama. Probably just some sleep glitch” and let the machine reboot.
That is when the real fun started. As it is restarting I get a similar screen (which I can’t screen dump…because the laptop isn’t booting!) saying the machine cannot boot.
Now I’m starting to be concerned. Because I’m a few days out from 6 conference talks at the biggest Oracle conference of the year. The laptop then goes into a “Cannot boot, so we’ll reboot” cycle which I don’t seem to be able to escape from, and then boarding call comes out over the public address system at the airport.
Aggghhhhh!!!
So I have to do a forced power off on the laptop, jump on the plane…and now sit there in a cold sweat for 5 hours while I fly to Sydney (because I’m now too scared to tackle this issue without a power supply).
I arrive in Sydney and renew the battle. I power it up, and the laptop says “I cannot boot”, but this time says … “Would I like to repair the startup?”. Why it has changed I have no idea, but I give it a shot. After a lot of progress bars, and messages about how long this might take, the laptop finally displays the normal login screen.
Phew !!!!!!!!!
But all is not totally right. If I sleep or shutdown the laptop, then on boot up, the first message I get is a sad emoji BSOD like the one above, after which it reboots again and then appears fine.
So … here I am, at the hotel with a working laptop… and zero confidence in it. Grrrrrr.
Not the best start to the week 😦
Learning is not a spectator sport 