Powerful paperweight...

How 'bout a little rantin' and ravin' this time? Yes? Good! Well, I just spent the last two days working on a friend's computer. Why? I just helped her family upgrade an old 486 to a peppy 240Mhz. Sounds good – sounds easy – right?

Not on your life! I put all the new parts in, started the hummer up, and configured it 'til I couldn't configure it anymore. The system worked lovely. I was, frankly, surprised (drum roll please).

Too easy this all was indeed. The moment I left their house, errors started hovering on their screen and restarts were more common than catching a cold. One error lead to another and I eventually had to interrupt my evening plans to come resuscitate the 240Mhz paperweight. An hour or so passed and what was bad soon went drastically worse. Amidst my tinkering and tooling, the computer's hard drive became corrupted thus not allowing it to start. Oh, dear.

More fussing followed as I fickly fumbled and foiled to fix the frappin' malfunction. I began reinstalling various items on the computer when it innocently asked me to restart. I did. It did. It continued installing but, lo! A nightmare appeared on the screen before my unbelieving eyes: a progress bar and message that read "Formatting". The hard drive was receiving a computerized enema. So, as my friend (not the friend whose computer I was working on, but another) and I laughed with tears of disbelief in our eyes, all traces of data on the hard drive were being shoveled into oblivion.

Well, another day passed where I poked and prodded the blasted thing. A morning repair turned into an afternoon project turned into an all-night extravaganza! I did, in the end, set the computer in perfect-working motion. Now only one thing remains: How long will it stay that way?

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