THE WHOLE STORY Part Two: LIZ'S HARDWARE ISSUES

Everyone does something moronic in his or her life. I am no exception.

Now, I feel pretty competent when it comes to personal computers. I have had one since Windows 95. I've owned five or six computers over the years and have reinstalled all of them back to factory specs. I know the ins and outs of installing and removing software. I'm the person friends call when they need help running Windows, removing a virus, installing software or fixing the HTML of a web page. Now, I don't begin to say I know a thing about hardware, but I'm mechanically inclined. I assemble mail-order furniture, program television remotes, change belts and filters on the vacuum cleaner and set the VCR to record a program for the following week.

My kids have an old computer with Windows 98 on it. It hadn't been reformatted in four years or had a virus scan run on it. I attempted to install a virus protection program, free from my high speed Internet company, but it crashed. Then, Windows 98 would not boot correctly.

I thought, You know, we don't really need this computer. That hard drive is only 9 gigs. All I want is my stuff off of it.

So, for the first time, I attempted a few hardware modifications. I removed the hard drive, which wasn't an easy task. It took all afternoon. Removing that one part meant taking apart the entire computer. Some cars are like that.

There were detached wires and plugs everywhere. The CD-rom drive was lying on the floor, as was the floppy drive and the zip drive. The only thing left connected was some white box with a bunch of wires coming from it and the mother board.

Then, it wasn't a simple operation to add a second hard drive to my other computer with Windows XP. I had to unplug all kinds of things and create an elevated platform for the new addition. Through trial and error of unplugging and re-plugging, I got access to that old Windows 98 drive without having to boot from it. It was now additional storage for my current computer. I was able to run a virus scan and clean up that drive.

Did I stop there? No.

I decided to add the old floppy drive to one of the empty bays. My XP computer didn't have one. It also didn't have a zip drive. The additional bays filled with extra devices from the old computer. All of this I did on the living room floor, away from my son's room. Not only did I have to plug in devices inside the CPU tower, I had to re-plug in the monitor, keyboard, mouse, power cord and speakers. To make matters worse, it was 90 degrees inside the house. This was not a job for the air-conditioned-less in the middle of summer.

All was well, except the sound. I noticed that one wire inside the CPU tower wasn't connected. It was a thin, little wire. It appeared to be coming from the speakers. I felt happy that I'd discovered it, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out where it plugged in. I saw similar wires and found an empty slot. So, I tried it and plugged in there. I then turned on the computer.

The wire immediately sparked and caught fire. Before I could unplug the computer, it had curled up like one of those firework snakes you throw on the ground on the fourth of July.

My husband electrical-taped its remains and we now run the computer without it. My lesson has been don't just plug in loose wires at random to find out where they go.

Later, that day, I realized the wire was not coming from the speakers, but from this little white box at the upper left hand portion of the CPU. I called my friend long distance, well versed in hardware. He told me that this box, with all the wires coming from it, was the power source.

I started to ask if I could replace the XP computer's power source until with any power source unit, like the one from the Windows 98 computer, after all, I'd removed almost everything else.
But, it didn't come out like that. Tiredly, I asked, "How important is that power source unit?"

My friend paused and then said dryly, "Uh, rather."

That was the first time I'd laughed all day. I explained what I meant to say and was glad, that he felt, despite the singed wire, I wasn't a complete idiot.

Sadly, this is not the end of my story. It's not quite as bad as my father's remark, "This isn't the first time I've done it." It's nothing like that. There were no more wires catching fire. I've since networked the house for printing from any computer and routed ethernet throughout the house. What took place was a comment my teenage son made when he returned home the next weekend.

I told him my story of the computer catching fire and the electrical tape. He went off to use that computer and promptly called out, "Oh Maaaawm. Are you aware that you've plugged the speakers into the microphone jack?"

That lack of sound had nothing to do with that loose wire.