Computer Woes!

Don't you just love computers? :-( My desktop caught a virus and crashed about 4 weeks ago. Thankfully, I have a laptop that had to work overtime until I managed to get a new hard drive, get it installed, and up and running. And that wouldn't have happened if my brother-in-law hadn't been so stubborn.

The hard drive in my desktop was a 30GB. Last Tuesday I went to Wal-Mart to purchase another one-looking for 60 - 80GB. Of course by the time Keith had removed the old drive and I left to find a new one every other available source nearby had closed. When I got to the store, I had two choices 320GB or 500GB.

Now, I can do most anything I need to do on Microsoft Word including using the mouse to draw with. I know a smidge about hardware. I know lots of terms and had already figured out that my hard drive had contracted a bug. I know the only way to rid your computer of bugs is to replace the affected parts, i.e., the hard drive. And I've been inside the guts of a bunch of Macs in my day, but I only touched what I had been shown by the computer gurus at my school district. We finally got an official computer tech on campus and I didn't have to do that any longer as a sideline. So it's been a while since I've seen the insides of a computer and Macs are put together differently than PCs.

I also reasoned out that moving up from 30GB to 320GB might been just a bit too much for my PC, but I bought the hard drive and took it home. Plug it in and turn it on and...nothing. My poor brother-in-law worked for a couple of hours, then said he'd come back. Six days passed and all I wanted for him to do was take the drive back out so I could return it for my money and find a smaller drive.

Keith is...shall we say...a bit stubborn. Last night he returned, took out the new and replaced the old. He'd done that on his computer one time and taking out the old drive and replacing it had cured his problem. Fine if it worked, but I still needed to upgrade the drive so I could load Windows XP - I'd been running Windows 98. So I still had to buy a new drive. He started reloading Windows 98 and got told I had a virus.

He put the 320 back in and we called tech support. An hour later we had Windows XP loading. An hour and a half later the whole thing stopped and refused to budge. Tech support had gone home.

This afternoon he called them back, downloaded a diagnostic to disk on my laptop, loaded that up and failure once more. Tech support, bless their little hearts, said that if the diagnostic didn't work then we probably had a bad new hard drive. Out comes the new drive and back into the box it goes.

In the meantime, a friend and I go to eat Chinese food in another town and did a little shopping including a visit to Circuit City where I found and purchased a 160GB hard drive. According to Marcus, the wonderful clerk, that should work. If not, I just needed to purchase a new computer.

My brother-in-law and sister return at 8:30, he installs the drive, loads up Windows XP and voila my updated computer is working! I loaded the Word software and an anti-virus software and I'm off and running again. Thank you, Keith.