Wednesday, November 18, 2009

When I Say I've Had an Awesome Week...

Okay, look.  So I KNOW that I"m positive, and I KNOW that I say "Be realistic; expect a miracle", and I KNOW I say stuff like "Everything I do today *works*", but you're not going to believe this one.

Two Christmases ago Santa Claus brought my niece a new laptop -- Dell Vostro 1000 (not that *that* matters). Earlier this year -- about 19 seconds past the end of the warranty -- her computer quit working. Got an ugly error message that basically indicated the hard drive had failed.  Took the computer to Best Buy in Salisbury, MD to "The GEEK Squad", who charged me $69 (plus tax) to tell me that the hard drive was indeed dead, and also told me that for the money I'd pay to have them replace the drive and re-install the operating system, I may as well just buy a new computer -- which I did NOT.

So I took the computer back home to my broken hearted niece and said, "Okay, Uncle Kelvin will take it back home with me and see if I can fix it..."  Uh... that was like... March.  My sister -- her mom -- says to me yesterday, "So what's the deal with Cari's computer ?", to wit I responded, "Darn, I keep forgetting to get a price on it, so... heck I'll just buy her another one for Christmas and we'll call this even."  BUT... I decided to look for an authorized DELL repair center anyway.  I found one, rang them up; they said it would cost me $80 for the labor (1 hour minimum) and whatever the drive cost; but the estimate was about $200 -- still cheaper than what the GEEK SQUAD said.

The SECOND problem is that my sister or niece --tomato, tomahto -- had misplaced the system CD so I'd have to get a replacement from Dell, but the guy said ..."a hard disk isn't really hard to put it, so if you get the system disc from Dell, you can get a drive from newegg.com and just use the new restore CD and get your pc working and save yourself some money.

So what the heck... I said, okay, I'll do that.  I went upstairs, got the laptop, brought it downstairs, plugged it into the wall and turned it on "just for grins and giggles" and... IT WORKED!  It's been working for the past 4 hours, doing one heck of a virus scan and running smooth as glass.

So, when I say I've had an awesome week... let's see you top THIS one: my house heals computers :-D  Is that positive energy or WHAT ?!

Have an awesome day !!

Kelvin