How hubs wrecked my laptop

hmm…this is a bit difficult to explain. See, my laptop actually belongs to my company. It’s my work computer. But because I do support work, I bring home my laptop with me everyday. It’s practically with me most of the time. Other from work stuff, I also have my own personal stuff in there (though I’m not suppose to )

Anyway, because it’s a work computer, the user created to login into this computer is not a local user. A local user is where when you start up the computer and login, you’ll be logging into ‘this computer’. The user in my computer is actually a domain user. The domain user enables me to connect to my office’s local area network. So when I’m in the office network, I’m connected to other computers, printers, etc etc.

The configuration for a domain user is different from a usual local user. If you view the properties at ‘My Computer’, a domain user is set to be a ‘Member of’ a certain domain name.

So, what happened was….hubs and I bought a new desktop over the new year. Hubs tried to connect the desktop together with my laptop. He was setting the both computeres to share out the internet connection without a router. During his experimentation, he went and set my user from ‘Member of Domain’ to ‘Member of workgroup’ and bam!…the laptop burst into flames.

No la…..because hubs removed the user from the domain. I couldn’t login anymore ! Well, the user is suppose to login to a domain, and since this user is no longer member of the domain, the user is practically useless. Cannot login anymore! There’s no way to add the user back into the domain, because we need a domain administrator to do that. Only my company’s IT helpdesk has the administrator access.  

It’s so frustrating because the computer is there, but there’s no way I can access anything in it ! And it was a long holiday then (New Years Day), so that would mean that I won’t be able to use my computer for 4 longgg days! Even if we had the new desktop it’s useless because all my stuffs are in my laptop. Moreover, the reason we bought the desktop is so that hubs and I won’t have to fight over 1 computer anymore.

This actually has happened to me before, and the way helpdesk resolved that was to format my whole computer ! This is bad because I haven’t backup my stuff for months! All my e-mails and documents that I’ve done for months will be gone! Imagine my frusfration!

Being so used to having a computer, I just felt so helpless when something like this happens. I know how dependent I am to my computer. All my stuffs are in the computer – even my groceries list. -_-

But thankfully, thankfully, I called my colleague for some S.O.S and he remembered that we have another user in our laptops. That’s because the group of us were installing some software into the laptop and the installation could not happen under the domain user. So, we created a local user for that purpose. I have completely forgotten about that local user!

I tried and was able to login to my laptop with that local user. I get to use my computer again albeit through a different user.  *RELIEVED*. Immediately, I started backing up all my stuff into the other computer.

After the holidays, I went back to the office, the new helpdesk guy was able to fix my domain problem in just 5 minutes. All he needed to do was add my user back into the domain. *Phew*. He asked me how this happened, and I was like *blank face* “I don’t know”. And he didn’t ask anymore. I like this new helpdesk guy .

Word of advice from me, create an extra user in your computer. Most importantly, BACK UP YOUR STUFF!!