I woke up Friday morning, wandered into the kitchen and turned on the computer then wandered to the coffee maker. A few minutes later, armed with my Cinnamon Dulce latte, I returned to the computer. The wireless network was having issues, so I went to restart. The big freeze. So shuddering as I did so (Premonition? Too much past experience? Both?) I hit the power button and held it until the computer shut down.
A few seconds later I started it up again. Did you know that on my computer the blue screen of death isn't actually blue? It's evil black. System error. Windows cannot load because a file is missing or corrupt. Please insert Windows start up disk to try to repair.
Now, years ago the lovely people at Dell stopped sending out system disks. In fact, my computer came with not one damned disk. Which means if a complete reformat is called for, I've no way to rebuild. Much hair was pulled out.
Finally it was 10 AM and the calls began. Geek Squad wanted over $300 to come out to my house and try to fix it, more if a backup and reformat was required.
The next repair place wanted $80 to come out, plus the labor charge to fix it and even more to back things up and reformat. At least $160.
All to stick in a Windows disk and repair (I've done that myself, takes just a few minutes, really. Not worth that much money.)
Third place we called said bring it on in. It would likely cost under $60. Ding, ding, ding!!! We have a winner! And so hubby disconnected everything and drove up the road to the shop. That left us with no computer for the day and major concerns about data that we may or may not get back. Luckily almost everything was backed up on our external hard drive so it wouldn't have been a major loss. The main concern was software. I don't know where all my disks are. In a box somewhere. And of course this computer never had disks for the software that came on it, so I'd be without Word Perfect or Word if it couldn't be fixed.
But by 4 PM they'd fixed it and sold us a Windows Sys disk ;) All for $40. A very good thing!!!
And everyone who worked there plays World of Warcraft, so that was kind of funny. They thought hubby was lame because he plays Alliance side, but apparently I am cool because I play Horde side ;)
PS: The moral of this story is that if y'all don't have Windows set up disks, look it up on the internet and create one!
