The Great Computer Disaster of 2009

In the past two weeks, I've had the worst computer luck!

On Labor Day, I stood up and tripped over my computer cord, which was plugged into my laptop. It yanked the computer cord out and destroyed the power jack on the laptop.

When we got back to Knightdale, we took the computer to Best Buy to see if they could fix it. They were absolutely no help and told us that we needed a new motherboard (~$400-500) on a 2-year-old computer. (Heck no!)

So, I got online and found a place in Cary that could fix it for $149. I took it over there, they fixed in 2 days, and I picked it up last Monday.

Yay!

Last Wednesday, I set a cup of mango green tea down on our coffee table right in front of Gatsby, who promptly knocked it over and spilled it all over my computer.

Awesome.

So I dried it off and everything looked OK.

And then the keys started sticking and the screen turned all sorts of colors and it started beeping incessantly.

Not usually a good thing.

So, I pulled out the mini screwdrivers and started taking the thing apart. I dried everything off around the motherboard, rechecked all the connections, popped all the keys off, and checked a lot of other things.

Brian helped me check all the connections and we got the screen working again, but the computer wouldn't boot.

So, I pulled out the old laptop and took out its hard drive to see if it would fit into this one.

It wouldn't.

Through a lot of trial and error, we figured that the hard drive was working, but completely wiped clean. Decided to reinstall Windows to see if we could get it to work.

Put in the Vista CD. ("We're sorry, we can't find a copy of Windows on this hard drive and this is an upgrade, so we're not going to install. Haha, suckers.")

Put in the XP CD. ("We're sorry, we can't find a copy of Windows on this hard drive and this is an upgrade, so we're not going to install. We hate you and since you've already paid, we don't care.")

Put in a Windows 98 CD (from 3 computers ago). Finally got it to start to install and then the install corrupted, so I then put in the XP upgrade to see if that would work now that Windows was "sorta" on the drive. It did work and I got XP up and running.

But the wireless card wasn't found and there was no power to it.

So, I took the whole computer apart again. Checked all the connections and everything was connected, so we figured that the card was short circuited.

And then the screen started messing up again.

Clearly, there were still hardware issues.

So, I got mad (still pissed at Microsoft and their lame "upgrade" CDs), went to Best Buy, and bought a Mac.

Very, very pleased with the Mac! Will never buy a Microsoft OS again.

Computer Disaster '09: A Photo Montage