Posted by Nate
Posted on 08-24-2010 under Business Operations, Office Nonsense

My laptop died last night.  It was an undignified death, with the loud internal fan wheezing and gasping for air as I attempting to type out a simple email.  The situation was this: mid-word, my computer failed to complete what I was inputting into its innards and like usual, I waited for the silver brick to just catch up to where I left off.  It’s not that I’m a fast typist as much as my Dell Inspiron 6000 has a chronic case of Alzheimer’s.  Last night it forgot to work; it forgot that it had a hard drive.

The so-called blue screen of death appeared, informing me that a problem has been detected and to make sure all of my hardware was properly installed, and if so, restart the computer.  It also had a slew of other PC jive nonsense at the bottom of the screen that no one but the Vicki robot from the Small Wonder 80’s sitcom would understand.  I restarted it, hoping it was just another case of whopping cough that she gets, only to find out that my state of the art Windows XP operating system circa 2005 wouldn’t boot up like it normally does; something it preventing it from functioning properly.

Starting to panic a little, I tried a few times to have it boot from the other boot options that the blue screen menu was giving me to see if that helped: it didn’t.  I hopped on the still functional iMac upstairs to see if any online tips would pull me out from the blue PC abyss but nothing seemed approachable; all the helper websites would tell me to re-install windows via a USB drive but there was just one too many abbreviated tech words sprinkled in the instructions for my liking such as NTLDR and NTFS.  I’m not exactly certified in this area so I call Dell tech support; well Dell is of no help because my warranty is years past expired and I would have to pay them $60 to have someone of questionable command of the English language walk me through over the phone, a checklist of things that could possibly, maybe, semi-probably, help with the situation.

No dice Dell.  Additionally, Dell’s tech support web page is also woefully inadequate to handle issues such as these.

Now, at this point I’m starting to panic good and well, because though I lost that loving feeling for my Inspiron 6000 years ago when I cheated on her with the sleek, and modern and whisper quiet iMac (silence is golden, am I right?), I am also an idiot; the vast majority of pictures that I’ve amassed over the last five years or so are on that laptop and not yet transferred to the external hard drive that’s been sitting in my living room for the past eight or so months.  I need to be strung up and stoned for this lackadaisical oversight, and I’m not talking about an herbal remedy.  All 28 gigs of my music are also trapped on malfunctioning machine, but I’m not as concerned about that since there are ways to get those MP3 files off the iPod’s themselves.  The pictures are what’s important, as well as some documents that I’d like to recover, but the computer itself is worth little to me or anyone else.

After calling a few local places, I ended up hiring a local computer repair guy based on a friend’s recommendation - Phillip Bishop of computer repair of Greensboro - to come out and see if he could get past the blue screen of death and retrieve my files.  He came out to my house this morning and did everything he could but in the end, the hard drive was corrupted and not able to open up on any other computer despite multiple attempts at doing so.  We both felt like it so was close to working, like the beating heart of the patient was there, it simply was unable to pump out enough juice through the computer to open up and save any data.

Flatlined.

Yeah, I’m not happy about any of this:  Dell’s shoddy computers/ customer service, the Hitachi made hard drive, my lazy, forgetful ineptitude.  My options at this point are limited to sending the dead hard drive to a data recovery center and shell out a few hundred to save my pictures and files or much like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club after Tyler Durden kisses his hand and pours lye on it, let it all go.  Regardless, one thing I know for sure, I’m done with PC’s for the time being.  No more BIOS or FAT32 or Windows based anything; I’m out.  No electronics product is infallible, especially not these days, but PC’s seem especially prone to these types of destructive events, as they enjoy a life expectancy of a goldfish.

In the end, as a consumer you pay a premium for Apple products up front, but you pay a much higher premium, one way or another, as a PC consumer on the backend.  And that’s with or without consumer incompetence as exemplified by my not utilizing a perfectly good external hard drive.