My Love/Hate Relationship

I love my computer and the convenience it affords me, but I absolutely hate it when something goes wrong with it. It has been undergoing some sort of breakdown for the past few days. I think our son Ben, my own personal IT guy, may have fixed it. Only time will tell I suppose.

For the last couple of years, I have been afraid to turn it off because it won't boot up. As a result, the computer has been running 24 hours a day for years. I have to start in “Safe” mode and then restore to a prior date. That is really a pain in the butt so I only turned it off when I had an update that required a restart after installation.

That was the case earlier in the week. The only problem was after I restored, it was supposed to reboot. It wouldn’t so I had double restores and it could have gone on ad infinitum.

When I had my old computer without so much stuff on it, Ben could offer remote assistance. In other words, he could control my computer at his house and work his magic. With all the security I have on this one, it would have been difficult shutting down my security programs and the numerous firewalls that Mr. Microsoft has installed. Ben found a way to again use remote assistance to help me out.

While all these problems were happening I was afraid that I would have to take it to someone for help. Ben is really busy with his regular job and being a slumlord, and I hesitate to ask him to offer anything more than suggestions for me to try to solve any problems I may have. I was worried about all the personal stuff that I have on the computer. I don’t really want strangers knowing how much our electric bill is or the balance on our credit card. I had email going back to 2005 stored. There were files and files of pictures. I decided it was time to store a lot of this stuff on floppy discs and CD. It seems to be taking forever.

Over the weekend Mr. Fixit and I was browsing in Staples office supply store, and I just happened to wander through the computer department. I found a PINK laptop that was just yummy at a reasonable price. I am such a sucker for pink technology. But being the responsible person I am, I walked on by after drooling over it for a few minutes. I had a little more trouble with Mr. Fixit; he found a 320 gig PC for less than $400. It had all the bells and whistles, and it was a great buy. I pulled him out of the store before he would whip out his debit card.

If the economy were a little better and we had a clue as to how much his bills will be from the heart stent (we are still waiting for the final numbers), I would have walked out of the store with the pink one. Sometimes being responsible is not fun, but I am so glad that this computer is working better than it has in three years.