My computer, as much as I love it, has been acting up for a while now. It’s less than two years old so I thought maybe it was the equivalent of computer teenage rebellion – “You’re always telling me what to do! I don’t care what you think, I’m going to run my fan all day if I want.” Next thing I knew, I’d be waking up to a computer covered in neon decals.
But while I was busy over-personifying my computer, I didn’t really consider the possibility that something was actually wrong with it. Such miscalculations in the past have often resulted in the loss of important data and hair I tear out of my head but for once I’ve kept up with my backups, avoided any potential viruses and, as far as I know, kept from dropping the computer from any great heights. None of that was much help when the screen decided to stop turning on.
A phone call with Dell technical support (joy of joys) and several nerve-wracking restarts later, we established the whole thing was shot and needed a new motherboard. Thankfully my warentee was still in tact and they’d send someone over to fix it the next day.
This afternoon, my friendly neighborhood computer-repairman arrived, ready to discet my computer and replace its innards. About halfway through the procedure on my computer which he, to my great amusement insisted on calling “the patient” the whole time, he asked me to come over and see something.
From inside my computer, he had withdrawn a plastic sticker that should have been removed by the orginal manufacturer and a dust bunny, I kid you not, the size of my thumb. The combination of the two had been seriously overheating the guts of my poor computer which had, in the last few days, given up completely while I continued to unknowingly fry its chips.
All’s well now and the computer is running better than before – certainly more quietly at any rate, without the fan running all the time. After surviving the proceedure I’m feeling a lot more cheerful towards my computer. I might even get it a neon decal as a reward.
Meaghan Fitzgerald is a marketer and entrepreneur building and growing consumer and gaming products and experiences. A Silicon Valley native, she started her first company, DormWise, in 2006 which she later sold in 2009. Meaghan spent 7 years in London in early stage consumer startups, two years at Xbox as a product marketer for Minecraft, and is currently the head of product marketing for VR experiences at Facebook and Oculus. Meaghan writes here about business, technology, gaming, and marketing. She has been named a top