I am not a geek, although many people perceive me as one but I have no technical training or expertise. All my computer knowledge has been gained by trial and error, and some of the trial parts has been particularly arduous. My first machine, a 386 processor with Windows 3.11 was my first experience of proper computing, although maybe that is not strictly true. I also owned an Atari 130XL, a proper looking computer, along with a disc drive, a huge thing that sounded like it was going to take off every time it started up.

It was mainly a games machine but you could programme in Atari Basic, which was fun, would you believe it is still in a drawer. But back to my 386, Dos came into my life, ver 6, and soon I was doing simple programming but it never lasted, too frustrating. I crashed the machine, in the sense that it froze, wouldn't do anything, so switch off and start again. I obtained the Windows discs, floppies, about a dozen of them, to be inserted one after another to reload Windows. But I continued to learn.

Then the big day, I had paid over 1,000 for a brand new Pentium 2 Dell machine, the excitement was unbelievable. I opened up the box and there it was, got everything set up and switched on, what a revelation. Windows 98 was the operating system, and along with other programms installed the machine was a marvel. Everything was fine, and steadily I began to fill up the hard drive, that had seemed an enormous capacity at new. But in fact my interest in digital photography had taken off at the same time so many pictures were placed on the computer.

I was really pleased with my purchase and couldn't wait to get home from work and sit at my computer. Then I got connected to the Internet which only increased my obsession with this box of tricks. Only a dial up, frustratingly slow at times, but still better than not being connected, then the screen started to flicker. Not much at first, but none the less it disturbed one of my photographs that I was working on. I switched off, time to go to bed, and never thought anymore of it. The next day I went on my computer and I was horrified, big blocks of colour, all in a line, up and down and across the screen, uniform from end to end.

Switch off and on again, just a reboot I thought, wrong, the coloured blocks were still there, and worse they obscured what was on the screen. So look through the manual at the troubleshooting part and nothing there but advice to call the Dell helpline. I rang, and a voice

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