Blackout!

We had a blackout at home yesterday morning! It was a real nasty “down then up immediately” one.

It took down ALL of the computers. Only one came back up cleanly!
Igloo the firewall came back unable to detect one of it’s network cards — hence no internet for the rest of the network.
Pingu powered back up, but didn’t actually boot! Pingo, my machine and the newest, came back up but couldn’t detect the keyboard!
At least I could laugh at the “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue” message 🙂
I’m not sure what happened to Pinga — Jan was at home at the time. She phoned me at work, but she’d already re-started the PC by that time.
Pingi wasn’t powered up at the time and didn’t notice. And finally greenland is in pieces in a cardboard box, so it definitely wasn’t affected.

I just found out tonight that it fried the NTL digital cable box. But only the TV side. Broadband Internet connection is still working. They are coming to fit a new one tomorrow morning.

This seems to be a lesson in using old equipment. The old ones seem to fare better in brownouts. Pingu did not notice the last two, whereas Pingo rebooted. But they all did badly in the blackout.

At least no costly permanent damage occurred. (the NTL digital box doesn’t count coz they’ll replace it).

Later days…
Mike