Author: G. Jefferies
A new blog friend suggested trying this daily prompt thing over the weekend. Not for me thought I, but up popped the word contrast this very morning. By sheer coincidence last week the relevant parts required to make Computer Say Yes arrived on Friday and it seemed only right to write the antithesis rant to last weeks post Computer Say No. Perfect contrast methinks.
So, after much catastrophising earlier last week a phone call to my PC supplier guru swiftly determined that Windows 10 wasn’t, in fact, lying when it said switch me on again without replacing the defunct drive and I’m just not going to play. Obviously I already knew this to be true because…err…why else would I be ringing them up…I digress.
A minor issue but when confronted by the splash screen and BIOS command and control centre rather than your nice log in page confidence and that catastrophising thing merge together and BOOM; mind bomb.
Stage one of the talk through open up the case, both sides thereof, and examine the skeleton within. Not too daunting thinks I for that bit gets done every so often to dust blow fans and keep it looking shiny. Panels duly removed and cast aside…
‘Unplug one of the internal drives,’ says the guru.
WTF thinks I staring at cables and gadgets.
‘Bottom right lower; caddy bay with two hard drives and two smaller SSD drives inside.’
These words I know. Seems he had my order schematic up.
‘Unplug the tiny power cable on the lower one and reboot.’
Too easy thinks I but nevertheless unplug the white capped cable and hello….Windows 10 is awake…well apart from shortcuts that linked to the lost drive whose contents now live on the SSD backup. They just stared back in resplendent white rectangles.
‘Thats the bad drive.’
No shit Sherlock. Think…not say…’Now what?’
‘Unplug the data cable and pull the drive out of the caddy and I’ll get a new one in the post. You OK fitting it back in?’
I was stilled bemused at how simple this was and at how anyone can sensibly charge for this in those high street repair shops. Seriously, two cables and pull it out…the innards suddenly seemed far less complicated. I like my guru.
By Friday a new internal drive had arrived and, for good measure, so had an external one. Might as well change the redundant broken one at the same time…yes, I know…should have done that yonks ago but when you have four drives inside the machine it kinda gets the prevaricating treatment.
Knocking a short story long…replacing was as per reverse of removal. Funny that, and so not complicated. Power up, sit back and drink coffee sound in the knowledge of a good job done by yours truly. Guru input was verbal…I touched the skeleton and life returned.
Except…it hadn’t, not quite. Why do new drives not come with bits of paper that say ‘oh, by the way you will need to initialise me first’. WTF stick in an external drive and it’s plug and play gotcha…internal…I’m here look, it says so in the device manager. Here are all the disks connected to me, including the new one but you can’t use it as I don’t know what it is. Lying b’stard…yes you do, you’ve flipping identified it’s there.
Right click…and initialise…enter a drive letter…no way…you can’t just pop up a menu at the start and ask me that? You designed to force folk to pay someone to do this or what?
Anyone else swear at inanimate objects that are displaying signs of stupidity?
Drive letter carefully typed in and in the words of Frankenstein…’It’s alive!’
Copy contents back from the SSD drive, reboot and all cured. Even the white rectangular ghosts were resurrected…
You can seriously do this at home…I mean, if I can…although you must not be self concious in communing with computers with very basic adjectives and nouns. (OK poor programming pun)
But,
Computer Say Yes 😇
And that daily word challenge readers is my contrast to the previous incarnation.
© G Jefferies and Fictionisfood, 2016. All rights reserved.