Pavlina: Life is Not For the Living

It was a normal hectic morning. The kids were chasing each other around, etc. Well, Martin crashed into the “sofa table” which is really this tall, narrow table. It is actually sitting against a wall, and is home to our XM/SIRIUS radio. There are some photos, etc up there as well. My laptop also happened to be sitting on it as well, charging. I kissed the offending boo-boos, then I heard the crash that no laptop owner ever wants to hear, the sound of my huge, heavy Dell Latitude D830 monstrosity hitting our hardwood floors from a height of about 3 feet, and my sweet angelic daughter had the classic “what was that? it wasn’t me.” look on her face.

Uh Oh. I never did backup my data yesterday, the way I am meant to every Monday. Uh oh. Oh, but it will be fine, don’t they test these laptops for this type of occurrence? I gulped and picked up my laptop from the floor, then pushed the power button. Nothing. All I got was a flashing caps lock. I tried taking the battery out, back it, etc. Only the flashing caps lock. Oh crapity. SO i went to the iMac, and looked up the issue, I think this is what I typed into the Google search field, “flashing caps lock after dropping dell laptop”. Surprisingly I found my way to a message board where I discovered that the caps lock flashed for ten and only ten times and this was key information related to some sort of memory failure. Others went on to remonstrate Dell employees for not seeing the significance of the caps lock flashing for ten and only ten times. Various people had wedged in bits of paper, rubber gaskets, etc to get the memory to seat properly. “well, that makes sense,” I thought. “When it hit the floor, the memory was probably jostled a bit, I just need to re-seat it.” So I flipped it over, unscrewed the memory B spot (easiest to get to), popped the ram out, put it back in, screwed the cover on, flipped it over and booted into windows. Sweet. Thank you internet, you have saved me again.

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