Anyone who has been using a PC for the past 15 years knows how it feels to kill a PC. If you have never ever had a computer not comply with a simple boot up, you owe yourself the experience.  Now, don’t go tinkering around and make something happen that you can’t reverse or repair.  Just rest in the knowledge that if or when it happens, you will experience joy beyond imagination.

I work at home as a medical transcriptionist. The company I work for used to provide us with PCs so that it would be fully loaded with all of the software we needed to type medical reports for our customers without it being an additional expense for us. Great deal, right? Well, we actually leased the equipment for a small, nominal fee until about two years ago. I had been in possession of this particular work of art for 4 years. It had been in someone else’s loving hands prior to me for God knows how long.  Are you starting to see where this is heading?

On this one particular day about 2 weeks ago, I decided to bring the PC downstairs because my house is extremely humid, and I need to be comfortable if I have to sit for 6-8 hours. It was working fine upstairs, turned it on and off before I was ready to do the move. As always, it sat very patiently while I positioned everything where it was going to go, plugged in every plug, moved the desk for optimum TV viewing, brought my favorite chair downstairs, and made sure the dictaphone was within easy reach.

Pushed the little blue button and walked away while the system booted up. After a couple of minutes, it had this strange (to me) message requiring for me to push F1 to continue because the SMART command failed. What the heck is this? After multiple tries, the screen finally said “autochk file not found” and it would restart itself until the cows came home, if I let it. I shut the computer down completely, restarted it, and got this message “No data read error.” Again, what? Because I am an official Googler, I looked up “SMART command” and got the information I feared. Two forums said the computer died and a new hard drive was in order.

I called my company’s support people and was informed that the computer had seen its last days. They sent me a new tower loaded with Windows XP (previously had Windows 2000). To say I am a happy woman is an understatement. My team leader said she was surprised that they sent me another computer because they stopped providing equipment to new employees so a replacement was unheard of. The reason being that any software we need to do our work can be installed via internet. If we already have a relatively new computer (less than 5 years old, I would imagine), our programs wouldn’t hurt anything on your computer.  Needless to say, I was extremely happy to get a new computer and pack that dead machine in the same box that the new one came in and to ship back to the company.

There were some benefits to killing the PC, albeit indirectly. I had to take that day off so I got my MacBook battery swapped, picked up a Nicoise salad at Saladworks, paid my bills, reconciled my Quicken account, and enjoyed a day of relaxation with my mom and her Yorkie, Isaac. Having the life of a computer geek is great even when you commit computericide!