lobita68

When I first started visiting this site, I had a Thinkpad running XP Pro, with terminal viruses and my ex-boyfriend's new Toshiba he had loaned me until I got the Thinkpad fixed. The Toshiba had viruses and was predicting hard drive failure. The critical event logs went back for over a year even though he had just bought it two months before. It crashed shortly after coming into my possession.

I am quick to learn almost any program, but had never seen the inside of a computer. I knew he would blame me regardless of the error logs, so I panicked and decided my only option was to get it fixed before I returned it to him. I was introduced to a Toshiba warranty technician and assumed all would be well. He removed the hard drive (thus voiding the warranty) and connected it to his computer to see if it was salvageable. It wasn't. The XP was up and running by the time I found this out, with lots of help from Broni and the gang. It was kind of a let-down to finally finish working on the XP that had dominated my mind and time for so long and I still had the urgent matter of the Toshiba.

I found another engineer and began picking both their brains and bugging them with every question in the book. They were as patient with me as Broni was and helped me acquire four semi-functional laptops,one nonfunctional laptop, a desktop, several CD-Roms, a handful of hard drives and other miscellaneous hardware items and various software programs. I began stripping the ones in the worst shape and piecing them together, under the direction of my engineers.

I'm narcoleptic, so I have dropped many parts; I right-click every time I fall asleep while holding the mouse; and I've uninstalled/ re-installed the same part several times because I fell asleep in the middle of the operation and forgot where I was at. I've also broken a few parts, lost a few, spent many hours with my tutors or on the phone as I struggled to perform difficult tasks that seemed quite easy to them. So far, I have three functional laptops and the desktop is ready for its first test run. After a couple false starts, the Toshiba seems to be holding its own and will be retuned to its owner before anything else can go wrong (or before I fall asleep again!)

I don't expect to ever get to the level of knowledge the people who have helped me are at, but I've found my passion and plan to further my education in the vast field of technology, although I'm not sure exactly what I should be when I grow up. I would never have thought it possible to take anything off a computer and have it work when I replaced it if I hadn't met the generous (and very wise) group of people at smartest computing. I'm grateful and have much respect for them.