When Good Computers Go Bad

May 02, 2014


Life took an unexpected detour last weekend when my computer began “acting funny” (my tech-savvy description). My husband spent a good portion of two days helping me tinker with the computer and doing online searches for things like “log on process has failed to create the security options dialog” and other, more ominous messages. After running various diagnostics and “fixes” (haha), which resulted in the computer doing nothing but blink at us, we finally determined the hard drive was failing and needed replacement.

My husband was confident he could replace the hard drive himself and we ordered a new one. We read a step-by-step description of the process, and watched a tutorial on YouTube. After the new drive arrived, he was able to put it in in just a few minutes. The most time-consuming thing has been reloading my operating system and all my programs. Fortunately, I had all my documents backed up. I thought I had my photos backed up but didn’t, not all of them—I’m still working on that. And figuring out how I can plug in my iPod without iTunes erasing all my music! (That’s happened to me before…) I figure by the end of today I’ll be finished getting things back to normal.

New hard drive
I’m deeply grateful to my husband, Larry, who worked patiently for hours while we tried to figure out the problem, and finally fix it. He put into words the moral of this story when he said, “You can fix anything if someone will show you how.” A good takeaway when life hands you unexpected adventure.

I would also add, if you have anything you value on your computer, back it up, Back It Up, BACK IT UP!

So endeth the lesson.

And how was your week?

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6 comments

  1. On the chance it will go to his head, I'll second the "awesome!" It's nice to have someone around who can get things back up and running.

    Glad you had a backup!

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  2. Laure--Yes, it is nice to have someone around to help in a crisis. And I was lucky that I had the backup--I had been putting that off for a while, and I'd finally just done a back up only a day or two before the crash. Whew.

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  3. Sounds like Larry is your Knight in Shining armor. Great advice to about back up - my brother constantly tells me to do it - sometimes I don't always listen :( - May be very sorry!! Glad to see you are up and working.

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  4. Thanks, Debbie. Yes, definitely back up your stuff. I got lazy for a while and just happened to back up a few days before the crash.

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