Well, I just finished putting my computer back together after minor surgery. It’s a little intimidating for someone like me, who’s used to messing around with software configurations, installations, palpitations and exasperations, but not so used to opening up the lid and rummaging around inside the box. I’m a software geek, not a hardware geek.
Messing around with the software, the worst you can do is have to install it again. Messing around with hardware, the worst you can do is bend some pins, break a cable, drop a large screw somewhere in the innards, electrocute everything and eat the CPU. Make a false move, and it could get expensive.
But it had to be done. Today’s modern software is more efficient than ever before at earning big bucks for hard drive, memory and CPU manufacturers. This time it was the hard drive that ran out of space. There was no getting round it, it was time to upgrade from having <number of megabytes that sounded really impressive a couple of years ago> to <number of gigabytes that sounds quite impressive now but will sound pathetic two years from now>.
So after gingerly carrying the thing home (who could believe you could fit so much in a box so small), backing up all my files just in case, scratching my head reading the installation manual, delicately plugging things in and unplugging and adjusting the jumper switches and replugging and wrestling with the BIOS and doing partitions and scans and checking for high blood pressure (mine, not the computer’s), it all seems to work. Nothing seems to have broken.
And I can’t believe I even thought about attempting it on Friday the 13th.
