I thought I would quickly boot up my old Windows 98 PC and look for the Photoshop file for my blog’s banner graphic. Quickly being a relative term when talking about my old computer … on a good day. Today is not a good day, apparently. For reasons beyond my knowing, the stupid thing is not seeing the mouse and keyboard at all. I already checked the cables. Well, I checked they were plugged in. I haven’t yet checked if they have been gnawed on by cats. This is a possibility. I’m going to wait for the stupid Scandisk finishes scanning the gazillions of hard drives I have on that computer, since I can’t stop it without a working keyboard. Then if it still isn’t working, I suppose I will pull the whole thing out from under the desk and do a more thorough investigation. This is not what I planned to do with my morning.

It makes no sense at all for it to not see the keyboard and mouse. It was seeing the keyboard and mouse just fine the last time I booted it up many months ago. Though I am wondering why the hell I had the Maxblaster hard drive floppy in the floppy drive. I don’t remember putting it there or what I could have possibly been doing with it. Certainly not formatting those drives full of data!

My gods. Scandisk is taking bloody forever!

Holy hell that antique takes forever to boot up!

Hmmm … the lights on the keyboard are on now. Perhaps it will all function so I can locate one silly file? That would be nice.

Still booting. Really … it’s taking forever. How did I used to used that computer?!

OMG! Will it freaking boot already?!?!

Argh. Still not working.

[Continued Later]

It would appear my old keyboard is non-functional. Owing to the fact we have an entire antique computer museum in our house, I was able to reach out, grab another ancient keyboard and plug it in. Everything appears to be working now.

Well, working as well as that computer ever works, that is … which isn’t all that well.

Now to go find that file!