As I sat at my computer to begin working, I noticed something funny: It was dead.
\n
\nThere is no humor in death, of course. Well, not right away. Death can be mighty funny after the fact, downright hilarious at times.<\/p>\n
No, when tragedy strikes your PC, the best thing to do is deal with it and then laugh later. That’s why when I originally wrote the Undeleting a File chapter in DOS For Dummies<\/em>, I got right down to business first, then joked about it after addressing the fix.<\/p>\n My PC was off, which is unusual because I leave it on all the time. So I tried turning it on. The Windows Recovery text screen appeared. I chose “Normal Startup,” figuring that who-knows-what turned the PC off. Windows never came up; the PC turned itself off again.<\/p>\n I tried turning the PC on a few more times. Nothing. It just wouldn’t start.<\/p>\n At this point I could have panicked. The PC in question is my writing computer. All I do is run Word on that computer and write my books. As I’m in the middle of a big project, my writing PC is important to me. Still, I had just turned in a chunk of stuff, so it wasn’t like I lost everything.<\/p>\n Further, I backup my computer. Daily. I knew that the external hard drive held everything I’d written all week (providing the system didn’t die before 1:00 AM when the automatic backup happens). So I wasn’t panicked, but I was curious.<\/p>\n I phoned tech support.<\/p>\n The PC is a Lenovo. I’ve been buying IBM\/Lenovo computers for decades. One of the main reasons I do is that their support is excellent<\/em>. I’ve had dead computers fixed literally on my kitchen table the day after they died. And I live in the remote wilderness of Idaho.<\/p>\n It turns out that the motherboard on my Lenovo ThinkCentre PC is known to have issues. I merely had to read the serial number to the tech support lady (who was in Atlanta). She immediately told me that my motherboard needs to be replaced and that a tech would be phoning me tomorrow (which is today, Friday).<\/p>\n My dead PC could be fixed Friday or, more likely, it will be fixed next week. Until then, I’m using my laptop as my desktop computer. Yes, the same doggy slow laptop I wrote about earlier this week.<\/p>\n The laptop is now connected to the desktop PC’s monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Further, I attached the desktop PC’s external backup hard drive. After some minor configuration, I was able to restore everything I’d written this past week, up until last night before I went to bed. So I’m happy, and I can continue to work.<\/p>\n What are the lessons of this story? Only one: Backup your stuff!<\/strong> External hard drives are so dang inexpensive that it’s just silly not to use one for backup. I mean it! Backup your stuff! You’ll thank me someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I sat at my computer to begin working, I noticed something funny: It was dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15,17],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc","tag-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}