Jagannath

In my house I’m the only person who uses the computer full time. My sister rarely uses it to check mail. Nowadays she doesn’t even do that as she is in 12th std.

I was recovering from surgery for the past 4 months, so there was no one using or cleaning the PC at the time. My poor computer was at the corner of the room untouched… for months accumulating so much dust and cobweb.

As I use the PC all the time, I don’t have the habit of using dust covers. Neither the cabinet cover is present because of frequent HDD transfers and stuff like that. These made the matters worse.

I was using the PC in this poor state for the past few weeks as i was so tired to clean it. Only a day before I thought the time has come to clean the mess out of it. So I disconnected all the wires and started dusting. I thought I could clean it better if I removed the motherboard from the cabinet…. then the processor from the motherboard…. the fan from the processor and so on…. Soon I was in a recursive loop and ended up completely dis-assembling the system. I did not regret as I can easily re-assemble them… I’ve did that before.

After cleaning all the stuff I put them back meticulously.
Double checked the RAM in the slot, connectors etc., Phew! what a tedious job. Occasionally Murphy’s Laws pitch in with the ’screw rolling to the least accesible corner’ and ‘u r nose itches when both hands are engaged’ stuff.. he he…

I switched on the power and voila!! the PC boots… I was congratulating myself on successfully reassembling the system and making it boot the first time itself. Before the happiness sinks in…. *beeooooopp* the system restarts. Whatever I do the system won’t bulge… It restarts after booting to the Windows XP desktop again and again. With utter frustration I shook the cabinet violently. It worked and now my computer doesn’t restart automatically.

Within a few minutes I heard a *pat* *tap* peculiar sound from my cabinet and white smoke coming from the HDD. aaaaggrrrhhh!!! I realised that my 40 GB HDD was fried… some IC in it blew….. ( I know it for sure because I blewed a lot of ICs in my electronics lab in college…..)

There was so much stuff in it… 6+ GB of eBooks and lot of other priceless stuff that I had from when i purchased the computer. But life has to go on… so I managed to set up my old 10 GB HDD. It took a whole day to format and install all the softwares.

Even though the computer was up and running again I felt very sad for my 40 GB HDD. I realised that now its a piece of junk. Replacing the circuitry would almost cost the price of the HDD itself and Data Recovery is a long and very costly deal.

and so the day ended on a sad note.

Lesson: Don’t be so rude to your PC. It has your Data… grrrrr….