Soob

My not so trusty steed, the Compaq Presario, has suffered a catastrophic malfunction. It froze up and upon reboot sat, blinked a little dash at me and did not even slightly make any attempt to boot up Windows. I tried to restore it's factory settings by way of the Restore cd's that came with it and came up short with a "write" error. From this I surmised that the hard drive was cooked and so replaced it. Once again I attempted to boot from the CD-ROM and restore the system. The computer, however, decided no such thing was going to occur and the whole process ends with it assuring me that there is, in fact, no operating system detected (you don't say?) and that error (some code) has occurred and that I should "check cable." Not sure which cable but apparently it's an exceedingly important one, so important that a mere mortal such as I am not to be privy to it's true identity and must be satisfied with the vague label "cable." Somewhere, deep in the belly of the Pentagon, there lies a folder with something very cloak and daggerish, something along the lines of "Eyes Only" let's say, printed on it's front. And inside said folder the true identity of the mysterious cable must lay.

I know little of the mysterious inner workings that entail a personal computer. I do know that the screws that hold the idiot thing together are painfully small and suspect very small people man the assembly line that craps these things out. And so it's off to the repair shop where some computer expert will explain, in grave and sage fashion, that the whisker-biscuit is fried and the gnoing-gnoing isn't flim flamming and nothing short of 500 portraits of Ben Franklin is going to make it otherwise.

Any advice is encouraged.