Well, it finally happened. After years of relatively good service, my computer refuses to boot up. No matter what I try, it just keeps doing the same old thing, nothing. That’s not entirely true as the screen does go through several iterations but keeps ending up at the same place. I bought this from a friend who knows a lot about computers. He had taken out the video drive and installed an SSD drive in its place. All in all, between us, it has been a very good computer.

I took the opportunity to go to Office Depot to take a look at the computers they had on display. A couple of them caught my eye so I had a few questions for the computer guy who was working at the store. He answered all of them and seemed quite knowledgeable. I thanked him making a mental note of the makes and models and drove over to the Best Buy store just across the street. I wandered around for a bit looking at what they had which was a lot and wondered how I was going to be able to choose between them. I am not a gamer so the very high end computers were quickly passed over. What I did want was something with an SSD drive plus a regular storage drive and it had to have a lot of memory plus a touch screen and I found the very thing in a top of the line Asus. While I was looking at this particular computer, a sales clerk whose name was Mauricio, wandered over and answered more of the questions that I had and convinced me to go ahead with the purchase. Actually, he didn’t have to work that hard as I had pretty much made up my mind.

I followed him back to the check out station and he went through the long process of the sales paperwork. Turns out that they did not have this computer in stock and it would take two days for it to be delivered to my door. I told him that was OK but he also checked the other stores and found one in a different store in South Austin. Before he had finished telling me about it, it disappeared off the screen as someone had purchased it. So, it was back to waiting two days for the new one to be delivered.

The next day, I got to thinking. I had already arranged for them to transfer as much off my old computer that they could to the new one. I will have to re-install my program files which will be interesting as so many of them are downloads and are not on disks. Oh well, face that battle when it comes but in the meantime, I wondered if they could resurrect the old computer. So, I loaded everything in the truck and drove back to the store and luckily for me, Mauricio was on duty behind the counter. He proved to be incredibly helpful and ran a couple of tests there and then and pretty much decided that one of the two hard drives had gone bad and unfortunately, it was the one that the computer boots off to start up. That pretty much decided the fate of that computer as I didn’t need to fix it, only get the info off the drives. I left that computer with them so they could start doing whatever magic they do and drove home.

True to their word, the new computer was delivered around 1:30 pm on the second day so I jumped in my truck and took it to the store where Mauricio asked a few more questions and then I drove home. With a couple of phone calls in between, two days later I got an email telling me that my computer was ready for pick up. Not wasting anymore time, I once more jumped in my truck and made the 10 minute drive to the BestBuy store and retrieved the new computer. This is not the first new computer that I have bought as I have had several and I already knew that it would not be set up as the old one nor would it have all of my programs on it. Most of my data was either in one of the Cloud storage units or on any one of several external hard drives that I had been using over the years.

Then followed several days of pretty intense work of recovering programs, those not on a disk but requiring downloading again. Locating the unlocking key’s was a bit tricky and I still have a couple to get but as I have nothing but time, presents yet another challenge.

So, there you have it. I now own a brand new laptop with 2 terrabytes of storage and a 256 SSD drive with 2 gigs of ram. Hopefully, this one will last me for the rest of my given days. If I should outlive it say in 10 years or so, I probably wont be needing a computer anyway and if I do, I will gladly buy a new top of the line model….

Written 10/14/2018