A friend gave me a PC because the CD ROM drive didn't work. Without it one can't load software from a disk so it was essentially useless. Usually I'm given old broken down obsolete PCs that I try to restore and give to someone who can't afford one. What I get is the experience in troubleshooting, but wow, this was a recent Dell with Windows XP. It was more powerful and faster than my own PC so it became real a challenge to get working again.

I suggested many times in past articles that one needs a second computer to google what's wrong with the first computer when it won't boot or access the Internet. I think Google has the answer to everything if one has the time and patience to find it. When you think about it, how can your problem be unique when millions of people are using the same hardware and software? Somewhere in cyberspace there's a discussion on your exact problem going on. Computers aren't like TV sets that nobody repairs anymore. There are all sorts of tests and things you can fix yourself and most of the time it's a simple software glitch rather than faulty hardware.

Luckily, the Dell PC booted up fine with the desktop showing. I clicked on My Computer and sure enough there was no CD drive listed. I checked the Device Manager by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Properties followed by Hardware and there was a yellow circle with an exclamation mark on the DVD/CD ROM entry indicating that something was wrong. By clicking on the drive and troubleshooting the following Code 39 error appeared:

I followed the advice given and uninstalled the driver and rebooted. This procedure will usually solve the problem by automatically reinstalling the driver but in this case it didn't work. Could the CD drive itself be bad? Here's where persistence and patience paid off. For the next week or so I continued to google and tried numerous suggestions with no luck. I was about to install a new CD drive when I finally came across a Google discussion on my exact problem. I followed the instruction for making a simple Registry change and voila, it worked! Fantastic! Good old Google came through.

The story was to end here until I next learned that somehow I had screwed up during troubleshooting and lost "Administrative User" privileges on the Dell PC. As a "Limited" user I could not change files, install software or access a myriad of tools. I was in a worse situation than before. Back to Google but this time nothing worked because as a limited user there was not much I could do. Fortunately the answer came from the New Bern Computer Users Group (NBCUG) after I submitted the problem to their e-mail list. It was to boot in the Safe mode where I could log on as an Administrator and thus change my rating from Limited to Administrator. Conclusion: Google is great but it also pays to be a member of NBCUG when you're troubleshooting. Lots of gurus are here. See http://www.nbcug.com.