New Computer Tower Up and Running

I’ve been complaining about my computer forever it seems. By maxing put the RAM and babying it along, I kept my old Dell going years longer than it had any right to run. Sunday night was the beginning of the end….

I have been using my MP3 player quite a bit at the “Y” as I put my time in on the Concept 2’s. I download and enjoy podcasts of “This American Life”. There was a broadcast of the history of the Nummi GM plan which was closing. It was an excellent show. I wanted to burn a copy of it to CD to give to Tim and Liz.

Working through my software programs I had to convert the MP3 files to Wav files and then burn the project. My computer was being seriously pushed to the redline doing this. Halfway through the burn things stopped. My system no longer recognized my “D” drive. This happened Sunday night, too late to mess with.

Early Monday morning trouble shooting with Google I figured out to pull out the tower, disconnect and then reconnect the “D” drive. It worked! My “D” drive worked and the computer read it. I had my drive back again!! YAY!!!

The CD was burned for Tim and Liz. Crisis averted, things were back to normal. I needed to copy a music CD to keep in the truck. My Nero burning program was all warmed up and busy at work when Mcaffee started a virus update. Those updates slow my computer to a crawl. When the updates were completed I realized Nero was no longer burning the disc, and my computer screen was frozen. I signed out of everything, but the last Nero screen would not close. I tried from every location and roundabout way I could. It was frozen in place.

When all else fails, reboot. The tower was turned off and restarted. I hated doing this as it would take forever for the system to fire up. This start-up progressed as they usually do, except before the Windows screen was due to pop-up I got the “blue screen of death” with the message in that dreaded white font saying Windows would not open due to a fatal flaw. I tried to get the system into safe mode with no luck. I was in over my head on this one…..

A computer service is just down the street from me. My tower was dropped off to be checked. I explained what had happened and what steps were taken to rescue my old system. I knew what the diagnosis was going to be. When I checked back with them the next day they complimented me on keeping my old system going as long as I did. It was a lost cause to repair that old tower: after almost eight years of service, it was time to update.

My files were transferred from my old drive to this new one. Finally the new tower was ready to be picked up late Thursday afternoon. Along with the new Tower was a mouse and keyboard. This new tower seems tiny compared to the old one. Hooking everything up I realized the connections for my old systems are way outdated! The new mouse does not use a “ball” and the scroll wheel actually works! I can’t remember the last time that wheel worked on my old mouse. I had become so accustomed to instead using the side arrows to scroll through pages I forgot those wheels existed!

Now I’m relearning my computer system. Once I located my hidden Kodak picture files I relaxed. Now if could only locate my bookmarks and saved passwords!

You don’t miss the water till the well runs dry. This episode hit me hard as it showed how dependant I’ve become to my computer: my “portal to the world”. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this new tower going for another eight years. One thing I’ll be doing today is to save all those Kodak pictures to a memory stick. Four years worth of pictures are taking up way too much disc space!