Samaritan Handyman

It's tough being the Good Samaritan, you know. Really, it is. Last week, I saw Royce laying in the ditch and attempted to come to the rescue. You see, Royce is a very talented man and his talent comes to light in many, many areas. There are many reasons why he is the leader of Liberty. One area that he hasn't quite mastered yet, is that of the technological realm. Now, I have fair-to-middling talents when it comes to technology. I'm no genius, that's for sure (stop laughing, guys) but I can usually figure out the typical problems that might stump the average Joe.

So, when Royce told me that he was having computer issues I told him that I would take a look. When I came over to look at his home PC, I knew immediately that we had issues. It was 6 or 7 years old and was still running a venerable edition of Windows 98. It's memory was overworked and it's storage was maxed. His printer was old, creaky, and unresponsive. So, I suggested that he start pricing new computers. To make a long story short, I met Royce at Best Buy and we found a great deal on a new computer and printer. I had a few errands to run, so I told Royce that I would meet him over at his house later in the evening. So, last Tuesday I got to the Mitchell mansion at about 8:00. I had told Lori that this shouldn't take very long. I expected to be home in a couple of hours. HA!

I set up the computer for Royce, connecting all of the various components. Royce has a wireless Linksys network for his home and since his desktop didn't have a wireless card we ran over to Target to purchase a wireless adaptor. Since his router was a Linksys, I went with a Linksys wireless adaptor. This is where everything went bad. It was now about 9:00 or so, and I still had quite a bit of software to install. But, before I could load much of the software I had to have an internet connection. So, I set up this new wireless adaptor. What I didn't know was the Linksys program that must be loaded for the adaptor to work has a bug that interferes with the Windows XP Welcome screen. It screws everything up. Now, I didn't know this at first, so I continued to load all the software. Anyone that has loaded Norton Anti-virus 2007 knows that it takes an hour just to load. So, finally, at about 10:30, I finished everything and restarted the computer. The weird image and log-in box that filled the screen told me that we had a problem. So, I got on Google and researched the issue. On a messageboard, several users who had experienced the same problem posted their solutions to the issue. I found out that there was 1 specific file that was causing all of the problems.

Now, when people ask for help when they're experiencing PC issues, I always advise them to refrain from just deleting files. There are specific steps that have to be completed in order to take care of the issue. Oh, that I would have listened to my own advice. I read that you could simply remove the file and it would fix the problem. Like an idiot, that's what I did. I restarted the computer, and a blue screen appeared, informing me that do to a missing file Windows couldn't load. Talk about instant diarrhea! Royce is looking over my shoulder the whole time, while I attempted to convey an attitude of "Yeah, I know what we need to do here". Finally, he figured out that I had screwed up. He was very, very nervous. He was sure that the computer was toast. I didn't tell him that I was thinking the same thing. Talk about feeling guilty. There was quite a bit of tension in the area.

Well, I had to start from scratch. I had to load everything again, including Windows XP, all of the software that had been pre-loaded. When I left at 1:00 AM, I still wasn't done. I ended up spending about 12 hours on everything. The thing that ticked me off was that it was all due to my rookie error. I HATE, absolutely HATE, being at fault.

I can say that everything is working great these days. In fact, it's as good as new. Also, Royce is now able to sleep.

I still get red-faced when I think of my errors, out loud saying a loud, Napoleanesque, IDIOT.