Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

It’s that time of year once more when I must begin to kick off our new home school year.  Actually, I’m in the preparatory stages. Last week, laptop #1, which is often used for my son to surf the Internet died!  I had plans to use this one for his Tell Me More German computer language curriculum. My immediate guess was the hard drive failed. I slide that hard drive out and replaced it with a known working hard drive from laptop #2, which is an exact duplicate to make sure my suspicions were correct. Sure enough, I was right as rain.  Laptop #1 booted up without a hitch. No, I’m not a techno-geek. I’m just a mom with a lot of hands-on experience. I ordered a replacement hard drive right off.

Yesterday while I waited for the delivery of the new hard drive to arrive, I began uninstalling his old computer curriculum from laptop #2. Uninstalling the program went fine. I shouldn’t have gotten worried since nothing bad happened as it always does, but I was too jubilant. Why borrow trouble? I began putting on his new grade level with the installation disc. Its job is to explore the computer to see if certain programs are on the hard drive to run the software and if not there, then its suppose to install the missing components from the installations disc. It found Flash Player and Shockwave were missing. That didn’t seem too strange. I figured when I did the uninstall of his old program, then it removed those files. Per the instructions, I clicked the install button so these programs could load. No sooner than I did a big error message flashed across the screen. Honestly, I can’t remember what it said now. I only knew it couldn’t load those two programs for some reason.  I manually downloaded both programs from the Internet and then restarted my computer. I began the installation disc process all over again. I was successful with installing the subjects, school year, and student setup to finally complete the job. Phew, I was happy no more problems popped up!

Later in the afternoon the new hard drive for laptop #1 delivered. Elated that the package arrived, it was a cinch to trade out the hard drives. I was getting pretty good with this sort of thing having done it a time or two over the years. I kind of feel like an auto mechanic, except for computers. I turned on the computer and immediately opened the CD tray and inserted the reinstall operating system disc into tray and closed it.  After the PC logo disappeared, a blue screen appeared indicating the file extraction in progress from the CD  to the hard drive. Ah, a sense of relief washed over me. Things were going well. I walked away to tend to other matters in another room thinking all was well with the world. I returned a few minutes later to see the horrid black screen with all the systems info displayed, and then at the bottom an ugly error message, which read HARD DISC FAILURE. I repeated the process a couple of times just to be sure I hadn’t nothing something wrong and sure enough each time I got the same response.

Now to wait for my RMA which could be a two-day process according to my email notification I received before I can even mail this lemon hard drive back for an exchange. I hope Murphy’s Law doesn’t follow me into next week or the week after, or the week after…