The Great Computer Crash of 2010

Yeah...you got it! There was an unexpected power outage and I was not in the office. By the time I got there to shut down my system, the "uninterruptable" power supply (UPS) was running out of juice. Sadly, it quit before windows closed. When the power came back on I very gingerly booted the system.......to no avail. I went through the usual routine of trying to outwit the Operating System.....to no avail.

So I had no choice but to re-install the Operating System and this required reformatting the hard drive. Now, I am a computer professional and I had nearly everything backed up at least twice over.....well, so I believed. Fortunately, I had the Operating System disks so it was pretty straightforward to do the re-install. Then began the re-build.

I began re-installing the printer, the scanner, the HP Ipaq hand-held, the internet, and some of the applications that I need. Now, living in the rainforest, when I bought this computer it came loaded with software that I need like MS Office and Frontpage. I no longer had the disks for these and I need them to do my job. I downloaded and installed Oracles OpenOffice which claims compatibility with MS Office but it would not run my Excel applications. I downloaded a trial version of Office 2010 but it would not install!! Frustrated, I searched the web and found a site that sold Office 2003, which is what I had before the great crash. I tried to purchase it but because I have a Canadian credit card and I am in Costa Rica, their fraud alarm went off and they would not sell to me.

Now even more frustrated, I resorted to downloading a pirate version. That worked perfectly and I am now back in business. I tried to do the right thing, honest I did but things don't work the same way when you are living in the rainforest.

So I am getting on with the rebuild and I reinstall Skype only to realize that I have no audio. I can't live without Skype or YouTube or FaceBook so this is serious. I called my local computer support buddy and after a while and a few false starts, I managed to find the audio driver for my motherboard on Intel's website, downloaded and installed and I was made whole again!

So the rebuild continues and I expect that in a couple of weeks I will be back to normal.