When a bit of knowledge is not enough!

My computer is driving me crazy. Not only is it running slow, there are times it decides to freeze. Even the mouse disappears and once the keyboard turned itself off. I’m going insane. So, as I have got two assignments to churn out before the end of this week, I know a little about computers and I thought I would be clever and run some diagnostic tests.

I should have held that thought for awhile.

I checked out the Dell site and found the instructions. I should have stopped there. But I didn’t. I made my first mistake. I started running the test on Monday night. According to the instructions the test was supposed to finish in an hour. I’m not sure which clock they were using to time the thing but the test was still running strongly on Tuesday morning. It finally finished around 9am. The error messages told me the mic wasn’t working. That would probably be because there is no mic!

Then I made my second mistake.

I found another test that looked at “system locks up”. I should have stopped there but of course I ran the test. It flew through the first few options and I was quite pleased with myself. Then it told me the next test would take 173 minutes! I got my son’s notebook and started working on that instead.

In the end, by late Tuesday night, the testing had finished. I could see there were certain tests that hadn’t made the “pass” grade but I couldn’t work out how to find the error messages. I pressed something and the screen disappeared and the computer restarted. I gave up.

Later on that night I wondered if the whole testing thing was just another way of procrastinating on my part. Perhaps I’m trying to put off writing these assignments?