As soon as all the computers start working at the same time and our Internet connection is actually stable, something goes wrong. One of the computers decides to have a fit. And it’s always at the moment I want to use that particular one for something that I can’t do on our other computers that it decides to not work.And as soon as I fix it, it will work for a while, then something else will decide to not work. It’s a waiting game to see which computer will decide to have a nervous breakdown and play dead. I almost think it’s a sign that I spend way too much time on a computer and if I spent more time doing housework, my computers would all miraculously decide to work and never go dead.

The most recent computer problems started a couple weeks ago, when I wanted to make a DVD on my husband’s computer. His is the only one that has a rewritable DVD drive. But we haven’t used his computer in months.

So when I turned it on, it gave me an error and wouldn’t load into windows. I did a couple of things and most likely screwed it up even more than it was. But there’s really nothing of importance on it that we would need to keep, so it’s not a big deal.

I just don’t like having to redo hard drives all the time. I have two old hard drives of my own that I’m using as storage devices now, or slave drives, because they just wouldn’t boot for me anymore. And they still seem to work fine as secondary drives. All of our computers, except the laptops, are a mishmash of old drives and disks, put together with old motherboards. This is the third time my husband’s computer has had to be reformatted. It was originally a Gateway with Windows Me on it. That was the worst operating system I’ve ever worked on. Then he had Windows 2000. That was the second worst operating system.

Recently, we had installed Windows XP on it, finally. And then that decided to kick the bucket too. It probably doesn’t help that Dave goes on websites he shouldn’t and most likely contracted some sort of adware or virus on it that keeps replicating itself each time we reformat it.

I’m almost tempted to buy a brand new computer with more hard drive space and more memory, but I’m too cheap. And I do admit, I love the challenge of trying to get something to work that seems unfixable by most people. It’s like a huge logic puzzle.

But I’ll be really mad if this drive decides in six months that it’s going to play dead again. I may have to take drastic measures and put it out to pasture.