My brother, Murray, had once proclaimed that he would never use computers. That was, until he required them for research, and email, and other miscellaneous things. Once a Luddite, not always a Luddite!
Monday, Murray and I looked over a machine that Jill uses constantly. Unfortunately usage was low, in fact non-existent. We tried a new power unit. The fans whirred, but the monitor did not light up. We hooked another computer to the monitor. That worked just fine. We tried once more and nothing, not even the BIOS settings, appeared.
Conclusion — the motherboard was fried. A quick talk with our local “Radio Shack” (now “The Source by Circuit City” – could you come up with more circuitous name) guy revealed what we had thought. Buy a cheap new machine instead of trying to make a new motherboard work with an old machine. Thankfully they had a cheap machine (actually, it was cheap and quite usable).
We transferred over the old hard drive (with all the data safely saved) and a DVD drive. The rest of the evening was spent in setting up programs and getting things running so Jill could use the machine. This is my first experience with Windows Vista, and so far the results are working in my favor!
Today’s task? Finish off my last day of vacation (I took from last Thursday – this Tuesday for my Father’s 90th Birthday celebration). I’m sure there will be some more quirks to the new computer, but other than that, a bit of relaxation will be in order.