November 29, 2004
Back to the usual ways
I'm in such a happy mood, now that I've gotten my computer back. It's actually been two months since my computer broke. Actually, all of my computers had broken. I had an old IBM Thinkpad that was my backup computer and it, too, had died, due to a failed harddrive. That forced to do the easiest and quickest thing at the time; buy a new drive and reinstall the OS and software, becasue I could not do anything else at the time, work or play! I was probably most upset and aggravated over the time I had lost trying to fix my computers.
Troubleshooting my PC was more troublesome, because it had a deeper, intermittent problem. Those are the worst, since I could not predict what it was that made my computer crash. It would crash not just using a particular program, a particular piece of hardware, or a combination of the two, either. Regular diagnostics could not tell me what the problems were, until it crashed, which would lose all the information in the process, anyway. Utterly useless! It was some time before I tracked it down to faulty memory, which luckily I had a lifetime warranty for.
Fast forward through two months of me working everyday, traveling, and generally being out, I finally returned the bad piece of memory and received the replacement part from the manufacturer the day before Thanksgiving. I tediously had to reassembled the computer after having taken it completly apart to troubleshoot the problem in the first place. I reinstalled a fresh copy of the WindowsXP OS, and.... Viola! I can continue my life once again!
Some people have a hard time seeing how attached I could be to my computer, but for the past couple of years, it has been my sole connection to the world when I travel, pay bills, and shop. Well, there's email and instant messaging, too, of course, but those things are pretty standard!
I discovered a neat trick in my computer setup, there's an option if you click and drag a window, it can make the window transparent, so you can see what's under it. Neat!
Posted by Jimmy at November 29, 2004 08:28 PM