Optimism....Hope amongst the Hopelessness

Allright - most of the millions reading this know that I was offline at the beginning of the year. My private laptop had blue screened on me.

My friends over at Geek Squad - took a touch longer than I would have liked, but they have me back up and running....

....on my home laptop.

At work, the company provides a laptop - they are pretty strict about how it can and can't be used.

You would think that, due to my problems with my home laptop, - I would have done a "better safe than sorry backup" of my work computer.

And that is exactly what I did - I thought about backing it up. So, when the work laptop crashed on me the three nights ago, I felt a touch sick.....especially when, after working with our help desk the next day, they said,

"we'll have to send another one out to swap out."

Translation - "you just lost everything since you last backed up."

Yet, during the call, the tech said - "the computer at least beeps. That sounds like a memory problem and not a hard drive meltdown."

Ah.....hope! - it's not a virus related corruption of the hard drive!!!

Now, I am not a master mechanic - my skill lies in taking things apart and not being able to put them back together again. So, when the tech said, "the place for your memory chip must be under your keyboard....I don't think I can help you," I was a bit forlorn......but I had that all important thing going for me.....MOTIVATION!!!!

"Wait.....I see some screws on the bottom of the case with the pictures of a keyboard" (which is on the other side of the computer) - I unscrewed those four fasteners in a hurry.

The tech coached me through the release of the keyboard - as, another skill I have is breaking things when I try to move things that aren't supposed to be moved. It wasn't that tough, but without someone telling me that it had to pop out, I would have abandoned the effort there. I proceeded on and jiggled (high tech term) that puppy out.

Long story short - I now have a skill I didn't have before. I can take my laptop apart and put it together again. I can put memory chips in and out (a skill I immediately put to use on my home laptop....when I was at Geek Squad, one of the problems that a stick of memory had gone bad. The Geek Guy said, "buy a new chip...see if you can put it in....it can be tricky...but, if you can't, you bring it back and you won't think the $39 we charge to do it is expensive." Let me tell you....it wasn't that tough....especially after having stripped down my IBM Thinkpad).

This turned me on to another idea - "when the new laptop comes in, I am going to take the old hard drive out of the crippled computer, swap it into the new one, and see if I can get an emergency back up done as it doesn't appear that this is a virus problem."

Sure - I may lose a couple of months of data. Will that be a pain? Yes. Will it be a waste? Yes. Should I have known better? Yes.

But, there isn't anything that I can do about the past - I can only hope for the future........and adequately prepare myself for the next opportunity.

As a newly self-appointed computer technician - I am ready for the challenge.

On the upside - no matter what happens, I can now do something that I couldn't have thought that I could do before......and, when you do that, it makes you wonder what other things in life that seem so mysterious aren't really as tough as people make them out to be.

That Optimistic mindset - is what opens doors to a more robust life.

No matter what happens with that data that is in play right now - I come out ahead.