As of this morning, Erin's computer is working. It has taken forever, but I think now that it's finally working, once and for all. I hope we upgrade her wireless card, but other than that, we're done tinkering with it.

It all started innocently enough when Erin let her case fall off a little table. Having a shell of plastic, it cracked and was splintered all along one edge. The top piece was dislocated and the front panel was ajar. When we tried to boot it nothing happened. It wouldn't even POST. The CPU fan would jolt a bit, but wouldn't even make a one-quarter turn. I thought it was the power supply, so I tested it with a space power supply unit that I had. No luck. I ripped the power supply out of my own computer; no luck. I was convinced then that it wasn't the power supply.

My experience told me to strip out everything and start from the ground up. This is usually a positive experience because starting with the bare essentials, you fend off bouts of desparation and regenerate slivers of hope for an otherwise destroyed system. This time, it was even more demoralizing. It turns out, the motherboard was cracked.

If any ground can be covered, we can at least say we figured out what was wrong with it. I've assembled countless computers in my day, so starting from scratch was not so bad (I've even been paid to do it for Zebra Imaging). In looking up replacement parts, I figured I wouldn't leave Erin stuck with an AGP graphics card, so I ended up upgrading her motherboard, her processor, and her video card in the process. She ended up with a pretty screaming gaming rig.

And so we danced, at least with UPS that is. I still have not learned my lesson when ordering things to be shipped - I work a bajillion hours and when are my packages delivered? When I'm working. Note to self: stop buying upgraded shipping, it's futile. We ended up having to go pick up the new parts from the UPS center. Once we had the parts, we went to Fry's and looked for cases.

I need to interrupt my own story for an aside: with Erin, learn to expect the unexpected and assume nothing. I thought I knew Erin's style or could at least ballpark it. Maybe I was just arrogant and assumed she had similar tastes to me; boy was I WAY off. All the cases I thought she'd like, she hated. A lot of the cases I thought she'd hate, she loved. While I was way off, it was cool to learn still something else and be surprised along the way. We ended up not finding a case at Fry's, but ordered one online a week or so later. (Her new case has a plexi-glass window, LEDs on the front and on the fans inside. A power-splitter has LEDs on the connectors. Who knew?)

Back to the story: So, at this point in time, we had the new parts, and we had ordered a new case online. For the time being, we rebuilt her computer in her old case and it was awesome. We installed TinyXP and the machine was blazingly fast. It was time to play Dungeon Siege, for a while at least.

For some lame reason, her case order was cancelled. Apparently, they thought they had the case in stock, but didn't, so the order was cancelled and we wasted almost two weeks waiting for the thing. Ok, we'll take that one on the chin and order another one. This one arrived without any hitches, but Erin's computer was not about to be done with us. We unpacked the shiney new case and I began one night to translocate her computer into it's new home. In the process the motherboard croaked. I wish that I was kidding; that maybe I was just throwing that sentence in there for a bit of cruel comic irony, but unfortunately, I'm not that good of a writer. I don't know how it happened, but Erin was once again without a computer. I had the same motherboard shipped to her place and it was there in two days.

So finally: new motherboard, new case, new peripherals, basically a brand new computer, and we were ready again. It booted fine, until it tried to load the operating system. After some investigation, I found that somehow her harddrive had corrupted. I took out the drive, shoved it in my machine and started trying to copy files for her so that we could reinstall the OS onto another drive. On a hunch, I ran a scandisk utility and fixed some bad sectors. It worked! I reassembled Erin's computer and booted into Windows wihtout another hitch.

So finally, her computer is up and running again and there are no looming problems. We even played Dungeon Siege this morning for a bit!