My Haunted PC

Today is my 64th birthday, and to celebrate, my son and I went to the gym. In addition to our workout, I wanted photos.

I brought along the Canon; J.P. took photos of me and I took photos of him. The store owner took two photos of J.P. and I together.

I have a USB thingamajig which holds the memory card of my Canon which allows me to download the photos onto my PC. There, I'll edit the photos and store them away. After the photos are transfered, I'll delete the folder from the camera. That's where the problem arose this morning.

I guess it comes down to dust. When we were in the U.S., I would regularly purchase canned air from Wally World and blow out the PC. I haven't done such a good job of that since arriving in Philippines. The cans of compressed air are difficult to find and are very expensive when you do find them. As a consequence, I've allowed the dust to build up more than I should.

Dust has accumulated inside the USB terminals. I'm not connected via cable or wire to the Internet - I use another USB thingamajig to connect via wifi. When I connect my camera's USB thingamajig to transfer the photos, somehow this additional USB device will cause the wifi USB to disconnect from the Internet. It doesn't happen every time, but often enough.

I've often suspected that the problem is due to the dust build up.

After transfering this morning's gym photos to the PC, I did a wee bit of image scaling with GIMP and set about to upload a few of the photos to Facebook. You know where this is headed. I had lost Internet connection. This reoccuring problem is fixed by removing the camera USB and rebooting the PC. That's when the spooks attacked the PC.

The PC would not restart. I was getting a message that a start up repair was required. Unfortunately, when doing this, the system created a restore point which was before this morning's photos were put onto the PC. So, when the PC finally started, the photos had disappeared. As far as Windows was concerned, the photos had never been on my PC.

I had deleted the photos earlier from the camera's memory card and now it was as if the photos had never existed. Gone.

After this disaster, I decided that enough was enough. I unplugged everything from the PC and carried it to a computer repair place in Sibulan where they used a small air compressor to blow out the dust. The dust looked thick on top of the PC innards, but I was really surprised at the amount that was blown out.

Total cost: 150 peso (roughly three bucks and change). That's a lot cheaper than the elusive cans of air - when they can be found. I'll definitely be going back regularly.

When I plugged everything back in and rebooted the PC, there was another sytem restore point message. This time, when the PC restarted, the gym photos had magically returned.

The thing is haunted.....that's all there is to it.