I called our corporate IT Helpdesk, and reported the latest plague on my corporate-issued laptop.
"My monitor just turned all purple. I think the computer is still running fine, but I can't get to the Task Manager with CTRL-ALT-DEL. I hear the disk drive spinning every few seconds, so I don't think it's entirely locked up. Same problem happened last week, but then the display turned all white. And two weeks prior to that, it turned all cyan colored."
"Run a chkdsk for disk errors," says the bored IT professional.
"Huh? Sorry, I wasn't clear. I have a problem with my monitor wigging out, displaying a random color."
"Ok, well, run chkdsk and see if it fixes it."
I was seething, staring at the caller ID on my phone with laser beam eyes, hoping that on the other end, he was feeling the pain of those lasers boring into his skull.
"Okay?"
"Yeah, sure." Click.
It's the same thing, a running joke in the office. Report any problem to the IT helpdesk, and they'll ask you to run a chkdsk.
In my case, the problem was somewhat rare. I'd only seen it happen three times, but the behavior was the same. The entire display would turn a single color, and I was unable to get to my desktop, or navigate my way to shutting down cleanly. I had to power off the laptop, and reboot.
So I ran chkdsk. There was a disk error, did I want to clean it up? Sure. I'm still fuming, because I'm certain this is just an error in the file allocation table, and has nothing to do with the monitor problems I've been having.
That was three months ago, and I haven't seen the problem since. But that just makes me angry, because I know it has nothing to do with the chkdsk /F that I ran. I could have thrown a butterball turkey at the monitor, and the results would have been the same.
"Yep, thanks, throwing the butterball at the laptop while it was docked solved my problem -- no more colored screens. Thanks, IT dude!"
chkdsk
It's the Miracle Elixir of the IT Helpdesk.
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