Last night during our 11:00 PM news, as the commercials that precede the weather played, the computer containing all my weather graphics crashed! This wasn’t a little crash, the screen was totally black with a cryptic directory path showing in a blocky white type. There was nothing to do but reboot.
What do you do? We scrambled. Commercials that would have aired later were moved up and I sat and stared at the screen.
If you think Windows takes a long time to boot for you, imagine watching the booting process while the entire TV station is put on hold… waiting. It was painful.
I’m not sure what happened, but I’m hoping we found the problem tonight. I can’t be sure. It seems to have something to do with networking and a hub that was slower than anticipated.
It’s just the kind of hell I’d rather not relive.
Unfortunately, the more devices that are running off computers, the more likely we are to see this kind of event become commonplace. It’s awful at a TV station – but imagine if your car or an airplane you were flying on needed to be rebooted at a critical moment. Oy!