WHEN DRIVERS DROVE ME CRAZY

Here's some good and bad news. The good news is that I'm learning more about how to fix my computer. The bad news is that I'm learning it the hard way. Thanks to a virus I picked up from an African news web site, my PC became infected with four threats. AVG Antivirus got rid of them all but the damage was done.

After some trouble figuring out how to use it, I ran the repair console in Windows. Unfortunately for me, it didn't clear up the problem of my lost flash drives. No matter how I tried, I couldn't use any external device on my computer. Even the printer wasn't working.

In times past, reinstalling Windows had cleared up my problems. But that trick didn't work this time. Asking friends what I could do next didn't yield any new answers either so I asked God for help.

As I pondered the problem, I remembered the motherboard disk that came with my computer. One folder was filled with software for the Intel chips. Believing that I had nothing to lose, I opened that directory and clicked on INSTALL.EXE. Lo and behold, my flash drive problem was solved.

Thanks to past failures of my equipment, I'm getting better at diagnosing problems. My training in MS DOS lets me understand about command line usage and pressing F8 when the computer starts allows me to boot the machine from different drives or the Windows CD-ROM. I even know how to replace drives. Furthermore, messing around with old computers has taught me much about their internal architecture.

One thing I'd like to do is to take a course on computer maintenance. There's nobody close to my home who repairs PCs so I could make some good money on the side. This would be convenient for the local folks too. Instead of driving for an hour to Edmonton and another hour home, they could drop off their machines at my house. Additionally, my basement is large enough for a work bench where I could work. As long as the government didn't find out, I could keep myself happily employed and make new friends with local people as well.

I mentioned my employment struggles in a memoir called How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. This paperback and e-book are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Virtual Bookworm Publishers.