Tales of a Computer Engineer

Right Brain takes a vacation for this post, while Left Brain muses about the painful irony of this computer engineer dealing with the simultaneous, painful death of not one, but both of the computers in the house.

Left Brain:  Every computer engineer dreads the day when you hear those words "my computer won't start.  Can you fix it?"  The reason is that we are at risk of revealing the big secret.  Even with multiple years of college education under his/her belt, a trained computer engineer usually can't tell what's wrong with a random computer any more than your Grandma does.  Unless of course they are the type that has tinkered with putting PCs together in their bedroom closets their whole lives.  For those of us not falling into that category, once you establish that the broken computer does not respond to that great fix-all of the modern computer era (i.e. the REBOOT), we're left with "umm.... did you try re-seating all the connectors in the back?"  

Left Brain:  From the perspective of the computer engineer in this situation, we observe the owner of the sick computer, who looks at us with a confused look, which very slowly transitions to skepticism.  This skepticism grows to a point where the computer owner begins to muse as to whether all that geeky computer talk thrown around by this computer-techno-nerd is just a big show.  The engineer knows its coming: the dreaded "I thought you had a degree in computers" or even worse:  "do you know the phone number of the guy down the street who went to that tech school?"  Most computer engineers are reasonably quick on their feet, and have the sense to head off such questions before they arise.  The approach commonly employed at this point is: "Well, it's probably your hard disk drive.  They can have problems after a few years, and can cause weird errors like this".  The great thing about this suggestion is that it is generally applicable, not easily verifiable, and completely shifts suspicion on the part of the owner from the lacking education of the engineer, over to "how much will that cost to fix?"  Engineer 1.  Owner 0.

Left Brain: Here's the big problem with this scenario.  When the engineer is the owner of the dead computer, the argument resolves down to yet another Left Brain vs. Right Brain debate, which typically just ends with smoke coming out of both the dead computer as well as the engineer's ears.  Even worse is when both computers in the house die, one right after the other.  After the first computer died, the smoke was drained from between the ears.  The problem was when the second computer died, there wasn't any smoke left between the ears to let out.  The result is pretty painful.

Left Brain:  We had two computers I had built a few years ago, one for the "family" and one for the "office".  The family computer was the target of kid abuse and wife-craft abuse.  The office computer was used for photos and the odd programming project.  No kids allowed on it.  The family computer endured a blue-screen-will-not-boot death, unfortunately not fixable by the grand REBOOT, and after a bit of diagnosis, the possibility of a hard disk failure was eliminated as well.   We checked the power supply as well, and it was fine.  That leaves either dead processor or dead motherboard, or both.  We decided to upgrade the computer.

Left Brain: As we didn't want to rush into the upgrade, I installed the family computer hard disk drive into the office computer as a secondary data disk, so the family wouldn't be without a computer while we figured out what to do for an upgrade.  As a couple of weeks passed, we noticed a problem with the office computer.  The keyboard and mouse wouldn't work!  I had had problems with USB ports in the past, but that was just one of the six or so ports that had a problem.  Now, no USB port would work, no matter how many or how few devices I had plugged into the computer.  This resulted in much desire to let smoke out from between the ears, but none was left.  @!!@#$!#&.

Left Brain:  To make the long story short, the mom of the house got a Mac Mini from Santa Claus.  This computer was designated as a no-kid computer.  We purchased a PCI-to-USB card for the office computer, in the hopes that it would provide functional USB ports, and declared the office computer to be the new "kid computer".  We purchased the parts for a new office computer, which I then put together and got working over the course of the month of January.  Now, everyone is theoretically happy.  I have a new computer which is working much more smoothly than the old office computer, and have successfully migrated all the old data over (such as the photos which I have yet to post).  There were several headaches with getting the operating system loaded onto the new computer (I attempted to load Ubuntu Linux as the base operating system, and run Windows as a virtual machine, but the IDE Boot ROM on the new computer motherboard doesn't like linux for some reason.  However, Windows boots just fine...  Go figure...)  However, I'll spare the non-engineer audience that story for fear of losing half of my two-person audience....

Right Brain: Well, Left Brain, I'm back, and I see you've been busy.  At least we see what happens when we leave you to your own devices.  A long blah blah blah post about a bunch of computer junk.  How creative.  Are you sure you didn't graduate from ITT Tech?