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.