Thursday, February 24, 2011

Five Years Old and Obsolete

This week after delving deep into the bowels of my PC and discovering that the Ethernet connection was permanently connected to the motherboard, two separate computer geeky guys told me about USB to Ethernet adapters. Yay! A less expensive solution to my satellite Internet service hard wiring problems in case my wireless connection decides to jump ship too. RVing friend Bill suggested I check out Dell's website to see if I could get a replacement motherboard for a just in case scenario so that's what I did. Which is where I discovered that a five year old computer is apparently obsolete because motherboards for my particular model and tag number are no longer available. Thanks Dell!

The computer continues to act hinky and I am into my second week of fighting with it. Windows has been trying to install the same three updates for two weeks without success. Which is annoying because the computer tries to reload those updates every darned day and then gives me the nanny-nanny-boo-boo message of "your downloads did not install". I tried all the suggestions for starting in safe mode, doing a clean reboot, blah, blah, blah. No luck. This morning after my second cup of coffee I girded my loins for further exploration into the Windows help system, knowing it was going to ask me to do things I was uncomfortable doing, like opening the C prompt and typing things I didn't understand.

Well, after doing a system check and being told some of my corrupted files couldn't be fixed I had little hope of the problem being corrected, especially after the computer rebooted and the update icon flashed back on to taunt me. But when I double checked the update history I realized the computer thought it hadn't tried to upload the new updates since yesterday so I clicked to upload them again, the computer rebooted and voila'--the updates are installed and applied.

Week two: Computer 0, Linda 2. Just don't ask me what the h*ll I did or how I did it, because I know I couldn't replicate it to save my soul.
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4 comments:

Sue and Doug said...

you won the war with the computer devils!!..now onto the battle!

SkippyMom said...

You're magical! ::cue the fairy dust and unicorns::

Way to go NMM. Glad to see you around and sane. [I'd have tossed it out the window a week ago.]

Erik's RV Blog said...

You could also try eBay. There are a lot of vendors selling those motherboards. You should be able to find one pretty cheap.

Good luck!

Erik

QuiltinLibraryLady said...

The same happens to me regularly...I'll try many things to make a sick computer well again and in the end don't know which of the things I tried did the trick. They're cantankerous machines.

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