Week or so of hell

I haven’t posted in a while, because I’ve been having the weirdest month.

The powersupply on my wife’s computer went out. So I replaced it with mine, I thought I’d just drive over to the big city of Danville and get a new one.

Danville has two computer stores, Office Depot and a small computer repair place that sells some computer parts. Never the part I need but it was worth a shot.

Neither had a SLI powersupply so I figured I’d be offline while I ordered one online. I figured if I had to order something online I’d go all out and get the computer that used to power the home entertainment system running again.

So I ordered a new motherboard/CPU (non SLI so if I had a problem it could be easily fixed).

I got the new motherboard and it gave me an error it needed to be flashed with a floppy.

It turned out I had a floppy drive on a computer I bought 10 years ago. It was the only part on that computer that hadn’t been replaced in the first six months. (CompUSA’s TAP program really, really paid off on that one.) I found some old floppies and planned on using the computers at work put the program on them.

The 13 plus year-old floppy didn’t work.

No problem I’d drive to Danville to get new ones. My car didn’t start.

The distributor was burned out, a problem that normally would take a couple of days to fix. With the holidays it added four more days to the process.

While I was waiting, I rebuilt my old computer 3.5 gig that only has one SATA port. I figured it would work while I tried to get the new slower one going. Unfortunately I can’t get the USB ports working so I would need two keyboards and mice, and there is just not enough room on my desk for that.

That was when I found out that the 10 year-old floppy drive I had didn’t work. I doubt the all fifty old floppies were bad. I tried them all.

So I rummaged through my old electronics and found the floppy drive from a ’97 Dell PC it looked to be in good condition. Then I found out Dell made proprietary floppy drives. Wouldn’t want someone using it on a non-Dell computer. The only other computer I ever had with a floppy was a ’96 Compaq and even if I kept the floppy drive from it I really doubt it will work.

Newegg has a great return policy, and I’ve got a good mechanic so in the beginning of the year all this will be worked out, but for now I can’t post much.

On the bright side having computer problems means I found out I have this thing called a family. Turns out I can call up my mom and talk to her in real time.

I also had a chance to talk to my 101 year-old grandma.

My wife is probably getting sick of my pestering her by now but she is being a good sport about it.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE