Tech Support

Woo hoo!

My computer was a little glitchy last night, not passing the Dell start-up screen on the way to booting up Windows. A couple long holds of the power button to shut it down and bring it up worked last night; but this morning it failed completely.

Luckily, I just bought a laptop and the router worked despite the main computer being down. So I went to the Dell site and got the trouble-shooting site and the manual for my model. After disconnecting the printer, which was the only device attached, I pulled off my socks (static charge on carpet and all that), opened up the computer and then pulled the power cord, memory, and hard drive connections; then reseated them all.

then I hit the power button and--after a painfully long time (to me, anyway)--it passed the Dell bios screen and proceeded to the Windows screen. Whew! Something loose, apparently. I was contemplating taking it to Computer Medic this week since I luckily have some time off. But that won't be necessary.

Man, sometimes I think my stuff is getting too complicated for my DOS-based computer history, but I still manage to do basic things like hook up TVs, routers, scanners, Wii machines, Blu Ray players, and do minor work on my computers like adding memory and external drives. And now, I avoided a trip to real professionals by trouble-shooting the thing.

I know. Minor league stuff. But at least in my mind, it separates me from the rabble that buys a new computer when a virus slows down their computer.

Of course, I won't know for sure if what I did really worked until I shut down my computer and restart it again. Which should be tomorrow. I'll let you know if I join the rabble.

And Dell should sigh relief. My desk top is less than two years old and I've heard some cautions about Dell. Since Lamb still uses my 7+ year old Dell (with added memory) which has performed flawlessly for all this time, I was a little annoyed that my new one might have died. So with Christmas coming up and Mister needing a new computer to get him through high school starting next year, I was figuring on a basic model with room for extra memory to be installed in a couple years to keep him reasonably in good shape until his mom and I ship him off to college with a new lap top.

Man. Now I'm depressed. One more computer to growing up ...