What Every Freelance Writer Dreads

Yes, it happened to me. My Sony Vaio which was more than six years old finally bit the dust. I have to admit, it had some help. You see, it was running real slow. I mean REAL slow and IE kept crashing. After having it reconfigured a few months ago, I was more than a little fed up. I am by no means a patient person.

So I figured I would add some RAM, since I was constantly using all 512 MB of RAM, the full capacity my Sony Vaio had. I had input memory before. Yup, I successfully added memory to my faithful Packard Bell back in the day. How hard could adding more memory be?

What's that cliche? Famous last words? Absolutely!

There's no getting to this climax fast but I'll do my best.

I found my computer spec sheet and took it to Best Buy. After a few minutes mulling around the computer department a nice man finally came up and asked if he could assist. Exasperated and clueless, I was already standing in front of the memory wall. I handed him my spec sheet and asked which memory card I needed. He handed me a package I had just set down only moments before he walked up.

I took it home and began my task. It took a some time to figure out how to get the cover off. Once I had popped off the side of the tower case, I now had to figure out how to insert the memory card. There were some slots within easy reach but of course they were not the right size. Finally, I realized I had to remove this big silver box before I could reach the memory card slots. I would later find out that big silver box housed my 80GB hard drive. (Yes, 80GB, don't laugh. I said it was over 6 years old!)

There were only two slots and both were being occupied. It took another minute or two or three before I realized that I had to remove one of the existing memory cards before inserting the new 512KB memory card I had just purchased. Instead of doubling my memory from 512 to 1024, I was only going to be increasing it by 256K. I was little annoyed to say the least. Figuring there was only one way to put the memory card in, I popped it in, closed the case and plugged it in. I turned it on only to recognize a electrical burning smell and a high pitched beep emanating from the computer. I'm no computer geek, but even I knew that couldn't be good.

I pulled the power cord out of the back of the computer and reopened the case. I flipped the memory card around and closed it back up. Unfortunately, the damage had been done. When I plugged it back in, there was no smell but that annoying high pitched beep persisted.

On the verge of upset I did what ever self-respecting woman does. I called my mother. She use to work at a hospital computer help desk for over twenty years before she had her stroke. She's about 90% better, but the stress of returning to work was not a good idea. In describing my dilemma I managed to keep a dry face, but she agreed that I probably fried the mother board. After listening for ten minutes while she talked about the events of her day, I finally hung up and went back to Best Buy with my fried Sony Vaio in tow.

I walked up to the Geeks Squad representative and described the symptoms.

" Beep? uh huh. Oh, smell? That's not good" He said
Of course that wasn't good! He suggested that since my unit was so old (in computer years) it would be best to just replace it. Then he went on to tell me that the data from my hard drive could still be transferred to the new computer. I could have kissed him on the spot!

I went out to my car and drove it to the curb. Feeling my luck about to change, I had the hip hop music blaring. I got out of the car and met him at the trunk of my car. I motioned to the passenger seat and met him on the car's passenger side. He laughed when I opened the door. You see, the computer was laying on its side like an open-faced sandwich with it's guts on display for all to see.

"Ah, a Sony Vaio" he said. With a flick of his fingers he had extracted my hard drive from the tower's mutilated core. I parked the car and then met him inside.

After filling out some paperwork, I wandered around the computer department clueless as to what to do next.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of What Every Freelance Writer Dreads.....





Laura Major
LauraMajor.com