When the S**t Hits the Fan...

My office computers, the ones that operate my inventory, sales reports, and actual sales, are old. I know they are old, the world knows they are old. I've cobbled together newer monitors, and we've burned out several mice, but the sales program that I operate was designed to work with Win 98 and I have to keep computers operating that system available for it. To upgrade to a new computer sales system, from the same developers, would cost $12,000 (not including the actual computers - just the program) and we would have to re-enter each inventory item BY HAND because there is no way to import the items from our older system into the newer one. I have more than 30,000 individual inventory items that would have to be rekeyed. Do you start to understand why I try to baby my old computers along so many years after they should have been in the junkheap?

However, my care and concern for the computers isn't always matched by them. And on Saturday afternoon, about an hour before we closed for the day, the register computer's screen came up with a fatal error. I had gotten one of these about two weeks ago and had managed to shut down and restart and everything worked fine. But that didn't happen this time. Now the networking connection between the register computer and that which holds all of the inventory information isn't being accepted. I worked on it until 9pm on Saturday night, but Sunday was Ren Fest and Men with Kilts. I had to attend. It didn't stop me from thinking about possible solutions/things to try, but at least I was away from the shop for a day.

So today I'll be back to trying to repair the network connection at 7am. I am hoping against hope that it is not a fried network card because I'm not sure I can get another one of this age. But I have two more things I can try before I call my computer guru and arrange to bring the CPU to him. In the meanwhile, that means paper invoices for people if I can't get anything else operational and that really sucks!!!! Sometimes I hate my life....