I had a dream. I dreamt I could order piece of a computer on the Internet and easily build my own machine. My family would live in a land of speed and magic.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I thought three months ago when I hatched this scheme. To make things worse, I told friends about it and even wrote a column. A couple of people I know asked me questions in the ensuing weeks. I had some trouble carving time into my schedule at first to set up the new system so I had a good excuse.<\/p>\n
I finally had a chance one night to hook everything up. As I wrote before, I have done a number of upgrades on computers in the past, but this would be my first attempt at building one from scratch.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the thing didn\u2019t work on my first try. I got a whir from the fan, but the rest of the system wouldn\u2019t start. I took a few deep breaths and headed to the Internet to see if I could figure out how to diagnose the problem.<\/p>\n
I Googled and Googled and Googled. I asked friends who work with computers. I poked and prodded and sadly traced the problem to the motherboard, which meant I had to take everything out, package up the bad part and wait for a replacement.<\/p>\n
After that interminable wait, I found out one of the most fun parts associated with buying things online. They sent me the wrong motherboard.<\/p>\n
I never expected the process to go without a hitch. I had built in a certain level of expected stress. But this just drove me up a tree. How could they get one bad part, go to the shelf and grab a totally different model?<\/p>\n
Luckily, it fit. But it didn\u2019t work. Well, at least I didn\u2019t think it did. The system started running, but nothing would come up on the monitor, and I couldn\u2019t figure out the problem. So I sent the part back and used the refund to buy another one, only to get the same result.<\/p>\n
At this point, I had wasted close to two months and had a very expensive coffee table sitting in my basement. If anything other than the motherboard had caused the problem, I could easily find a replacement part.<\/p>\n
It had to come to this for me. I got cocky and now had to pay. So I schlepped the whole system to a computer shop downtown and hoped for the best. I was getting near the point where my investment would not have saved money over buying a similar system already put together.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, the folks in town fixed me up with no extra cost, and I now have a brand-spanking new computer which kicks the butt of our old system. That old dinosaur now sits in the basement.<\/p>\n
That got me to thinking about how I could salvage its useable parts. With just a few upgrades, we could have another spiffy new-ish computer. I think I can handle any problem that comes my way now. Just don\u2019t remind me I said that when I\u2019m crying over the latest snafu in this project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a dream. I dreamt I could order piece of a computer on the Internet and easily build my own machine. My family would live in a land of speed and magic. That\u2019s what I thought three months ago…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-computers","wpcat-3-id","wpcat-33-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1360,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}