Since we returned from our holiday, I’ve been wanting to offload all our photos from the hard disk we brought with us. However, there is 80GB of shots to dump and we don’t have any way near that much space.

I bought a brand spanking new 500GB hard disk to accommodate all of the shots; since SATA disks are the way of the future and IDE (or PATA, take your pick) I opted for one. However, all my computers are IDE only. I bought a SATA-IDE adapter (which makes the new, fast hard disk run slower, but on old hardware) as well as a new wireless router.

The wireless router replaced my network switch, old wireless router and computer which routed the Internet. The unit works fantastically and worked first time; it is just as good as the old computer, except it takes less power, doesn’t have 50GB of cache and doesn’t randomly crash due to hard disk failures.

So, using the old computer, I connected the 500GB SATA disk and found I’d been sold the wrong adapter. The next day, I returned the adapter and had another one purchased from a different shop by a work colleague who was nearby. The salesperson sold him the wrong adapter, but the same type as the one I’d been sold. The next day, we both went to the shop and explained it was the wrong unit. The salesperson claimed it was the right unit and that we just didn’t know how to use it.

We returned to the office and I connected the adapter to a computer which has both SATA and IDE connectors, and has a SATA disk already working. Moving the disk from SATA to IDE it didn’t work. Big surprise! I took the whole computer back to the store and showed them it not working. They offered me another one, and when I told them it was the wrong adapter they told me they didn’t sell the right ones and gave me a refund. Back to square one.

On the way home, I took a detour to yet another computer shop and found they had the correct adapter. I bought one and spent much of Saturday morning attempting to get it to work. The computer could “see” the new hard disk but refused to begin booting after the initial device detection (known as the POST).

Sunday, I didn’t bother with all the frustration and instead went out on a photowalk.

After work Monday I returned the adapter and instead bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard, CPU and RAM which would work with the hard disk. Ironically, it was the cheapest of each I could buy, and it’s still better than my desktop. I set everything up at home and found out the power connector didn’t fit in the new type of motherboard.

It was at this point I realised that over the past week, I’d had nothing but failures in regards to computer equipment. My magical aura seemed to be failing me and instead I broke everything I touched. This is not the first time it’s happened.

Chris was kind enough to lend Justine a laptop which refused to connect to our wireless network. It worked when security was turned off but not when any type of security was enabled. The laptop, being Windows XP SP2, should have connected without issue. We swapped from a PCMCIA wireless card to an internal MiniPCI one and the problem continued.

Finally, the tide began to turn in the right direction.

I found that you can use a 20-pin connector on a 24-pin motherboard as long as the power requirements are not high (i.e. super-duper video cards). I plugged it in and finally my fancy-pants new hard disk (along with it’s new motherboard, CPU and RAM) worked! I was able to install Windows Home Server (another topic for another post) without any issue.

Next, I found a hotfix for the wireless issue I had, which enabled me to connect the new laptop at WPA2 — the highest wireless security on my router.

Yesterday at work, a computer which had — up until the day before — been working fine was emitting a high-pitched noise when the power was connected and wouldn’t turn on; the power light on the motherboard was on though, indicating power was reaching the board. Immediately I drove to a computer shop and bought a new hard disk. The salesperson there asked me what I would do if it was the motherboard and not the power supply. “Bah,” I replied, “it will be the power supply.”

And it was.

Finally, finally my mojo hath returned after a week hiatus. I know not why, but it’s good to be back.

Over the past three days, I have witnessed not one, not two, but three strange happenstances with computers at work.

The first strange happenstance involved a user who was unable to open a Microsoft Excel document and could open a Microsoft Word document but not print it. Printing was fine from other applications and when logged onto other computers. Reinstalling Office did not resolve the problem.

The second saw an application running all day at 99% usage causing the computer to be unusable. I did the regular thing and reinstalled the application but when logging back on the user’s local profile “blew up” (to put it nicely) and refused to use their settings. I tried many things, including logging on as the computer administrator and was unable to delete the local profile. Total and utter failure number two.

Finally, I put a standalone application I’ve written on a third computer today and it refused to run. When the application starts up it reads a configuration file and uses the settings contained within. The application was able to locate the file but when opening it fell flat on it’s face. When I renamed the file the application knew it wasn’t there and crapped out with the appropriate error message. Of course, it works perfectly fine on every other computer in the office.

Normally, I have an aura around me which causes computers to miraculously fix themselves whenever I happen to wander near; just a mere look from me will resolve even the harshest of problems. But not this week. Has my mojo vanished, now that I am no longer a nerdy bachelor?