Unpredictable
You never know what’s going to happen on a given day.
Case in point: This morning, as I had a rather rude awakening, with Dad coming up to my room and telling me that his laptop was dead after a little water got on/in the bottom of it. It really worried me, as I didn’t know if that meant the motherboard was fried or what exactly was going wrong. Basically, the hard drive wouldn’t spin up and the screen would remain blank after the initial BIOS screen.
I quickly hopped onto my computer and searched on Google for the service manual for his HP laptop. I found the 273-page PDF and got it printing immediately. Once it finished printing, I thumbed through it to find the hard drive removal instructions. I had a 20 GB notebook hard drive that was in my MP3 player, and I decided to try to install that into the laptop to try to determine what exactly the problem was — whether it was a bad hard drive or something worse.
I first hooked up my MP3 played to my computer, and I copied all 10 gigabytes of files onto one of my desktop’s hard drives. After that, I planned to install my hard drive into the laptop, hoping that the computer would show signs of life then.
Well, Dad was in a rush to make it to a morning deposition, so I hurried and got my laptop ready to go so he would be able to take it with him to the depo, while I worked on his.
Since things weren’t quite as urgent, I was able to break away from the laptop work long enough to go with Paul, John, Mark and Jude to Bob Evan’s, where we took Mom out for a late Mother’s Day breakfast. We had a really good time there, talking and laughing as we ate our pancakes. I think almost all of us got the multigrain pancakes, by the way. They’re really great!
Once I returned home, it was back to work on Dad’s laptop. I was able to physically put my 20 GB hard drive into his notebook. Thankfully, the computer detected it and seemed to be accessing it without any problem, which would indicate that Dad’s hard drive had died.
Anyway, I went on to format my hard drive and then installed Windows 98. I spent most of the afternoon hunting for the correct network and graphics card drivers. I think I have finally got about everything installed on his laptop, and now I’m in the midst of copying all of his data back from a recent backup. Thankfully, we had a backup in March and we routinely copy files from his computer, so not that much was actually lost.
I’m out a 20 GB hard drive right now, as my MP3 player is once again out of service. I’ll probably find a replacement drive, though, to put in there and get that back to working order. First things first, though, and Dad’s laptop is definitely a higher priority than my little music player.
I’m very thankful that this seems to have solved the problem. Phew! We’ve learned yet again that water and electronics just do not mix well together. 