Now, let me stress out that I'm no techie. I don't go and fiddle with any hardware and my idea of fixing things is to save up and get someone to fix up things. So when I finally got the laptop (which is a Compaq Presario X1000), I was totally clueless.
For a few nights a week, I tried turning it on but it kept giving me a blank screen. I went to my cousin's house and her husband (who is a computer genius/handyman) helped me out and changed my OS to ubuntu. It was okay for a time then all of a sudden I kept getting the blank screen again. Finally decided to have one of technicians check it out and told me that there was something lodged in the drive. He fixed it (for free! Good guy!) and now I have it up and running again.
First Step: Get an OS that is unusual to your sight.
A nice way to change things is to change the outside. I decided to use Ubuntu because 1.) it is for free and 2.) a tight knit support community can help you out when you have problems.
I was surprised on how easy it was to install. It was my first time to install an OS by myself last night and it went pretty smooth. Despite the fact that Holly's laptop is quite old (as pointed out by the technician) I didn't have any problems at all. Nothing life threatening or surprising. In my cousin's words: It was pretty smooth.
So here it is. My working laptop!
Feeling techie,
Someone Anxious
P.S. As of 6pm today, experiencing some problems with it again. At times it will do the whole disk error again. After reading stuff online and talking to the technician, my diagnosis is the heat. I believe I'll have to get the fan fixed or buy a cooling pad. Anywhoo... Still hoping it is workable. :)
