Maria's 6-year-old Gateway computer shut down sometime early this week and resisted attempts to re-start it with the start button. I checked the power cord and it was connected on both ends and plugged into an active power strip.
This morning, on an impulse, I moved the power cord plug to a different connection point on the power strip and, voila!, it started up. About 30 minutes later, Maria noticed the smell of something very hot and maybe burning. We traced it to her computer and yanked the plug.
Since she lived through a barn fire at her farm during her first marriage, she is very fearful of fires and says she no longer has confidence that the computer won't torch the house. It's been upgraded once to handle Windows XP and has been running very slowly lately because her son made a point of loading every conceivable game on it and using it to surf zillions of porn sites. Being the ADD/HD poster boy, he also had a habit of clicking on-screen buttons without reading the accompanying text, which caused myriad process interruptions and nasty challenges to the software and hardware. So I'm inclined to get a new computer.
I checked with my computer mentor Colorado Tim and he confirmed my belief that the eMachines Desktop with AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor 3400+ that Best Buy is selling for $650 is a good solution. It will give her 1GB of RAM and a 200GB hard drive.
I doubt that either of her hard drives is damaged, so I should be able to rescue the data from the smaller one and install the larger as a backup drive on the new machine.
This is all happening, of course, because I recently claimed about $3,800 worth of stock that was overlooked from my mother's estate. First it was an unexpected bill for the stepson's trade school tuition, then a $1,200 dental bill for a failed bridge and now another $650+tax for a new computer.
This has been a karmic reality all of my adult life - whenever extra money shows up, it is quickly followed by enough unexpected expenses to claim most or all of it.
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