A salutary tale

This week I have been grappling with IT problems - seemingly intractable at one point, which had an oddly simple solution.

I use the Ubuntu operating system, and this week I decided it was time to upgrade to the next distribution. without me realizing it, my broadband service was disrupted by the recent poor weather with the result that the upgrade files did not download correctly. The result was that the machine crashed every time I tried to boot up, giving just the mysterious comment that "Postfix" was being reloaded.

Matters got worse: although I could access the boot menu the upgrade would not load correctly from the CD I had made. The final course left open was to boot into recovery mode - for which I need to be able to access the "grub" menu. This menu is accessed by pressing Esc at an early stage as the machine starts up, but the pc would not recognize the Esc key and although I could access the BIOS it would not register any changes.

Stuck! ... after several hour of head scratching the solution turned out to be simply changing the BIOS battery (cost £2) lodged deep on the motherboard, a bit unnerving, but easy enough, and after that everything was downhill.