Computer Problems Are The Worst.

Nothing gets me more anxious, depressed, and miserable than computer problems.  They’re just the worst.  I know there are far worse problems to get upset about, like health issues concerning friends or family, but computer troubles are the “first world problems” that just ruin my day.  I don’t understand them and they usually result in costly repair or replacement bills.

It should come as no surprise then, since I’m talking about it today, that I’ve been experiencing some computer problems lately.  My poor laptop bluescreen-crashed twice in two days last week.  Fortunately, it was able to restart successfully both times.  As usual, I became anxious, depressed, and miserable at the prospect of having to repair or replace my trusty laptop after getting smacked with two car repair bills and some major plumbing work that needs to happen in our house.  This time, however, I decided to try fixing this problem myself.

Those two bluescreen crashes were caused by a “kernel data inpage error,” so I looked up what that meant.  I nearly went cross-eyed reading computer forums and I had to poke around my laptop’s precious digital innards (a place I am not qualified to be), but I determined the cause was bad sectors on my hard drive.  Not great news, but apparently running a program called “chkdsk /r /f” (also run by poking around digital innards) could provide a solution to the problem.  I ran the program on the affected drive.  I had to once again poke around in places I’m not qualified to be to try finding the results.  I saw multiple messages of “disk does not have enough space to replace bad sectors,” only to have it followed by “Windows has made corrections to the system, no further action is required.”  The messages felt contrary, so I reached out for help.  Folks told me I needed to clear out space on the affected hard drive and try again.  I went from 5GB of free space (this laptop’s C: drive is very small) to 40GB of free space.  I ran chkdsk again, and this time it didn’t take so long.  The results were, once again, a little contrary, but with a slight improvement.  There was only one instance of “disk does not have enough space…” before it was followed by “…no further action is required.”

Much of this adventure was confusing to me.  I’m not sure why clearing 35GB of wasted/unused space was still considered “insufficient space,” but the bluescreen crashes haven’t happened again and my laptop seems to be booting up quicker thanks to clearing all that space.

I did my best.  This was probably a band-aid on a bigger issue and I will probably have to buy a new laptop hard drive in the future.  In the end, I’m pleased with myself for attempting to fix a costly problem on my own and not completely panicking, like I usually do.

I know things could be much worse, but computer problems are still the worst.