If you read these
blogs, back in Week 26 I wrote about being afraid my computer hard drive might
have crashed. My hard drive was fine,
but the computer actually wasn’t. It ran
for a bit longer and then last week it died.
Well, not exactly death, a light would still come on, but nothing
else. I was panicking. Oh no, what will I do without my
computer! I was right in the middle of
final edits for my latest book! Oh
no!
I sent both a text
and email to a friend hoping he could maybe help me. I was pretty upset. And then I calmed myself down and began
remembering that I had taken a college course in PC repair for just something
like this. I didn’t want to take my
computer somewhere and have someone else fix it for me, but for some reason I've always had an unreasonable fear of opening up my PC. I realized I needed to do this myself. Computers really aren’t as complicated as you
might think. At least PC towers aren’t.
And so I began to
think about it. The computer didn’t seem
to be getting the power it needed. I
checked the symptoms online and confirmed my suspicions that I had a bad power
supply. All I would have to do was to
change it out.
And so I did the
first scary thing, I opened up my PC. In
the college class one of the first lessons we were taught was not to be afraid
to open up your computer. Put things in,
take things out. It looks really
complicated, but it’s basically just a bunch of parts connected. Pull out the bad part, plug in the new part.
Looking at all the
wires inside, they were all zip tied together.
What wires were connected to what?
I couldn’t just disconnect the wires because of the damned zip
ties! I tried to cut them off with a
knife, but that was difficult and dangerous.
So I let my computer sit until my days off. I would get back to it then.
Once my days off
arrived, I drove to a place called Fry’s and found a new power supply that cost
me $75. It seems like a lot, but it also
seemed like a really good power supply.
I also stopped at Walmart and bought some tin snips to cut the zip
ties. That would make things much
easier. I arrived home and got to work.
Red wires, yellow
wires, there were all kinds of colors! I
clipped all the zip ties off and unplugged everything that was connected to the
power supply. Then I carefully pulled it
out of the case. I opened the new power
supply and it looked much nicer! No red
and yellow wires everywhere. I plugged
everything back in and was then ready to put the side back on and give it a
try.
There was a photo of the inside of my computer here, but thinking about it, I don't know if there are any serial numbers, or anything that I shouldn't be posting. Better safe than sorry, so I removed the photo. Trust me though, my PC's inside looks great!
I put everything
back together and it wasn’t as scary inside my computer as I had thought it
might be. I plugged it in and pushed the
power button and my PC flared to life! I
was thrilled! Part of me wanted to put
more stuff into my computer! I’m no
longer afraid to work on things in there, so maybe now I’ll need to save up for
a solid state drive (No moving parts, so no failure or loss of data
supposedly). Maybe a Blu-ray player? I
don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.
For now though, I’m no longer afraid of anything breaking in my computer
because if I can replace the power supply, I think I can fix anything else
inside there, too!
And as for the red
and yellow wire failed power source? That
went into the trash can.
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