Computers

Back in the day, I took typing in high school. Of course, this was in the last century, and our typewriters were huge, manual monsters, requiring strong fingers.  It proved difficult to press hard and at the same time to type quickly.  Speed was never my forte.  There was one electric typewriter in the classroom and we all had to take a turn at it.  Oh my!  You barely touched a key and bang! it typed.  Scary for certain.  

When I was a Senior in high school, I started working at our local doctor's office, at first just filing charts.  As time went on, I was able to learn the different jobs: receptionist, insurance billing, typing in patients charts using comments the doctor would dictate into a dictaphone.  All the typewriters were electric, so I quickly learned to use them.  No longer scary, they were amazing with their plastic ribbons that created crisp letters.  And no more hanging capital letters, the bane of typists who didn't press hard enough on the shift key.

Fast forward to the mid eighties when Dan began to regale me with tales of an awesome machine called a word processor which the secretaries at his work used.  He said I'd love them!  I couldn't even fathom such machines.  Then I went to work for the school district as an aide for the gifted and talented department and part of my job entailed using word processing and spreadsheet programs on a little Apple computer.  It was out of the frying pan and into the fire, but as I learned the in's and out's, I was amazed at what I could do. Soon I was convinced that we need a computer at home, and so we purchased an Apple clone and the whole family was off and running.  Several years later, we upgraded to a PC and we've never looked back.

A month or so before I retired, Dan presented me with my very own laptop.  He had a laptop for his consulting business and we had a desktop in the basement, but this would be my very own toy--I could put all my machine embroidery software on it, haul it to my sewing room, or use it upstairs.  I've loved my personal "baby" for almost five years, so last Saturday when it went into a coma and then died, it was a sad day for me.  Fortunately son-in-law Eric is always willing to be our computer tech, so I put my baby into my briefcase and took it to him on Sunday for a final diagnosis.  He checked it over and was pretty sure it had died.  

Monday, Dan and I set out to look for a new computer. In five years, computers have changed a lot. My baby ran on Windows Vista, and while many have cursed that version, I always got along fine with it.  Now, it's Windows 8.1 and touch screens.  Oh. My. Goodness.  To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. However, after several stores and finally finding a sales person at one store whom we knew, we felt we were getting a handle on the search.  One big issue for me is my embroidery software which is a few years old and only lists Vista and Windows 7 as compatible operating systems.  I was relieved to hear that most likely any program that could run on 7 would also run on 8.  The touchscreen was kind of alluring, so having to get a new computer wasn't looking quite as dismal as it had.

Then, Tuesday evening, after nine, our phone rang and it was Eric.  He said he and grandson Keaton (age 11) had taken my whole computer apart, had searched the internet for possible solutions, had found an unlikely one, tried it, and . . . my baby, when they'd reassembled it, had started up!  They'd previously removed my hard drive and given it to me so I could put my files on a new computer, so Dan and I decided we had to take it back over, plug it in, and see if indeed my baby was alive and well.  We hopped into the truck, drove to Ann and Eric's, handed over the drive and waited while they installed it. YES!!  We had success!!

And what, you ask, was the unlikely solution to the problem?  A suggestion on the internet was that there could be a soldering problem with the motherboard and the solution was to bake it at 390 degrees for ten minutes.  Yes, you read correctly:  bake the motherboard.  So they did, and it worked.  This blog post is being typed on my baby and I'm thrilled to have it back home where it belongs.  

The above picture was taken this afternoon.  ♥