Picture a skinny guy, cold at the face, facing the future with a single luggage full of belongings right in front of a bus station, in a city he has never seen before. The feelings get you, “what am I going to do?”, “this city looks amazing”, “I am all alone though”, “well, we gotta start walking, at least”. Now picture the exact same thing but couple days later, when I turned on my work computer for the first time.
I wasn’t going to demand the shiniest, newest device available on the market, and I knew that jobs in the public sector are never synonym with high technology. So I was somewhat expecting what the boss said; they had a couple old desktops lying around which had controlled laboratory equipment at some point, and I could pick one of them for myself.
The smile faded when only one out of four machines would turn on, and with Windows Vista of all things. Creepy, smelly old system with barely enough memory to boot up, and a disk drive that would have been more at ease inside a museum than close to real work. I imagined that installing any browser would be a pain, let alone reproducing video. My thoughts forced me to picture what a video call would look like in such a system, and that made me shudder. Immediate power off, and out came a screwdriver.
I hoped my new boss didn’t mind me gutting the other devices for parts, but I suspected that was exactly the reason why they hadn’t turned on earlier. After almost filling the entirety of my lungs with 10-year-old dust, I managed to pull out three more RAM sticks and a bigger hard drive than was currently in the Vista old timer. The drive had no regular power cable available from the power source, so I had to pluck a sketchy-looking adapter from another machine. Got my USB stick loaded with Windows 10 from my personal laptop, that I had carried 5 km by bicycle in my backpack for this exact scenario, and got to installing. So far, so (painfully slow, but) good.
A few days later, I got to work on the dot, and started up the machine like it’d been routine for the rest of the week. Except for the part where it didn’t start, and instead just made one loud “beep” sound and stopped at a black screen. What the hell?
Out went the Windows 10 USB drive, this time in recovery mode. I suspected that maybe there had been some error in the disk, and indeed, a scan of the system showed lots of issues. It completed a repair but still wouldn’t turn on properly - I had to rebuild the boot sector for it to turn on again. Good thing that now Windows was greeting me again, yay! Ran a couple tests and it seemed like all was great in the world again.
Since this story hasn’t ended, you can probably guess where we’re going. Yes, the next week the exact same thing happened, with the black screen and all. Boss man was getting curious about why I spent so much time below the desk instead of over it, but he was genuinely just curious, which I appreciated. As for my colleagues, all that time with the screwdriver had earned me the fame of being able to master the ancient art of the “computer stuff”. Even if that meant having to answer questions about Microsoft Office which I despised, it was alright.
Back to the computer, this time I had no idea what had gone wrong, and the same steps I had done the first time didn’t help. “Let’s go nuclear”, was my opinion then, meaning I just reinstalled the entire operating system. It was tedious as hell, but I couldn’t be bothered to diagnose disk errors on such a slow system. Couple hours later, install done, programs ready, no disk issue. I tried rebooting three times in a row, zero black screens.
Work was great for a short time, and then, guess what?
Now I was fed up with this particular Frankenstein’s shenanigans. Maybe it was time to build me another one, and I started gutting the machine to migrate to one of its equally untrustworthy siblings from the office.
I had already covered half of the floor with random hardware, when I saw it again: the sketchy-looking power adapter. It was directly connected to the hard drive—was it possible that..? I unplugged it, took a brief look inside and the answer was obviously a fat YES. The darned thing was missing a couple pins.
This entire time, the disk had been starved of energy. At random points in the day, it’d attempt a heavy operation, run out of power, and corrupt the contents. Me formatting and reinstalling was just a temporary relief that would help me make exactly zero progress toward the final solution.
I spent a good 30 minutes looking for a non-sketchy adapter inside other devices, and made sure this time that it was usable. Then reassembled my dusty Frankenstein, got my USB drive out and painstakingly installed Windows 10 for the third time on the old guy.
The next few days went by as my fear grew immensely every morning, up until the weekend. Back on Monday I was terrified to press the button, but I mustered my courage, took a deep breath and just went for it. Couple seconds of nothing, then a loading screen, then a few minutes of nail biting and the Windows welcome track, that I never knew could sound so heavenly. It was annoying that I had carried the extra weight of my laptop for 5 km again for nothing, but I was glad not to need to use it anymore.
Although that’s not exactly the case, but let’s end the story pretending that the PC didn’t die on me out of the blue a few months later. It’s tidier.