Disaster and Catching Up!

Thursday July 30th, started just like any other summer day in my household. My daughter was off at summer camp and the boys were playing outside. Meanwhile I was working in the office. Around noontime I decided to take my normal break for lunch not knowing what the fates had in store. When I returned from lunch, my computer was powered off. I didn’t think too much of it as every so often one of the kids will turn off my computer by accident.

I pressed the power on button. NOTHING! I tried again. Still nothing. I was a bit worried and knew it was one of two things. It was either the power supply which I had replaced about a year before or the motherboard. I took the computer to Tiger and they told me it was the motherboard and I needed a new computer. Just to make sure, I took it to Best Buy and they confirmed the bad news.

I was not in the least bit worried about any of the data files. I knew I had them installed on a hard drive I could remove and if that didn’t work, I had all my files backed up on an external drive. I was just more upset at having to unexpectedly needing to buy a new computer. So after looking at a new computer, I bought a Gateway computer. It does run much faster than my old computer. My only complaint is that Gateway does not make it easy to install additional hardware. I called customer service, they told me “We don’t recommend that BUT you can call our pay per call number and we’ll tell you.” Sorry what I heard is “We want you to pay us for that information”

After several tries, I gave up on moving the old hard drive into the computer and restored all the files from my backup drives. I also had to reinstall all of the software I use. All of this had to be done during my busiest weekend of the year. It has taken me about a week to get things back to the point where I can get some work done. Furthermore, I have to get used to Windows 7 as I used to use XP.