Dakota turned 12 yesterday and, terrible uncle that I am, I managed to let it slip my mind completely and never got around to calling him during the day. I’ve had his PC with me for the past week because it keeps having problems for him and finally got to a point where it couldn’t detect the hard drive at all and my brother was planning to buy a new HD.

I didn’t think the HD was really the problem and when I got it home I found that the SATA cable to the hard drive was a bit loose and reseating resolved that problem. I finished staging the PC and have been working with it off an on since then and haven’t had any problems the whole week. I suppose it’s possible that the HD cable has been loose all along and thus the cause of his problems and all the diagnostics (CPU, RAM, motherboard, etc.) I’ve done have turned out negative. I’ve been teasing Dakota a little about being a “cursed user” as I can’t find anything wrong with the hardware.

So I got home late this evening, too late to call and wish him a happy birthday, and noted there was a message on the answering machine. Yep, it was from my nephew who was calling because now my niece’s PC starts to load Windows and then suddenly reboots in an endless cycle. Hmmm. I’ll probably end up taking his PC back to him in the next day or so and when I do I’ll take a look at my niece’s as well. The kids worry about having to bug me when their PCs have problems, but I figured when I built the PCs that I’d probably end up supporting them quite a bit. If nothing else it keeps me on my toes.

So, here’s my belated Happy Birthday wish to my nephew. I’ll have your PC back to you in a day or so and I hope you had a good time celebrating the day.