Yesterday morning, I was losing my mind.
I had turned on my computer because I wanted to use Notion.
That’s it.
Except Notion wouldn’t load. Chrome was painfully slow. Everything was painfully slow.
And I finally said:
“I just want to boot my computer up in the morning and USE it.”
I had already reset this computer earlier this year after OneDrive caused a whole mess of problems. I thought that was supposed to fix things.
It didn’t.
So yesterday, instead of continuing to tolerate it, ChatGPT and I started troubleshooting.
Not with 27 things to try at once. One thing at a time.
We checked Task Manager.
CPU? Fine.
Memory? Fine.
I have 32 GB of RAM. More than enough for what I do.
But then we started watching the disk.
100% disk usage.
And sometimes it was sitting at 100% while barely transferring any data.
That’s when we discovered that my perfectly capable little Dell was still running Windows from a 500 GB mechanical hard drive.
A spinning hard drive.
In 2026.
😂
Suddenly, a lot made sense.
Windows would boot and immediately start doing things in the background. The hard drive couldn’t keep up. Chrome wanted something. Windows wanted something. I wanted something.
Everyone was standing in line waiting for this poor little spinning disk.
Then things got more interesting.
We decided to replace it with an SSD.
After an absurd adventure trying to find one that was ACTUALLY AVAILABLE to purchase — which is an entirely different AI lesson — I ordered one.
It arrived that night.
I installed it.
Windows didn’t see it.
I reseated it.
Windows STILL didn’t see it.
Into the BIOS we went.
The BIOS saw it!
Eventually Windows found it too, and we started migrating my entire Windows installation from the old hard drive to the new SSD.
Programs. Settings. Files. Windows itself. Everything.
The estimate said about 45 minutes.
Then the old hard drive started throwing errors.
Read Sector Error.
Cyclic Redundancy Check.
Bad sectors.
So this wasn’t just an old, slow hard drive.
The drive was actually failing.
Suddenly the computer problems I’d been fighting made even more sense.
The migration kept going. It hiccupped through the damaged sections, skipping sectors it couldn’t read.
At bedtime, I left it running.
This morning, it had finished.
Then came one final adventure: convincing the computer to actually boot from the NEW drive instead of crawling right back to the old Toshiba.
We finally disabled the Toshiba in the BIOS and restarted.
And...
WOW.
That was literally what I typed.
“WOW!”
Windows appeared.
Fast.
The desktop loaded.
Things opened.
I checked Task Manager.
Disk 0: Patriot SSD.
We did it.
So naturally I opened Notion — the ONE THING I had wanted to use when this entire adventure began.
It opened.
Immediately.
And my response?
“Well I can open Notion and do what I wanted to do IF I still wanted to do it.”
😂😂😂
Because after spending an entire Tuesday diagnosing my computer, buying an SSD, installing it, migrating Windows, discovering my old hard drive was failing, and finishing the job at 5-something the next morning...
I had completely lost interest in the thing I originally wanted to do.
But this experience was important.
I learned more about my computer in one day than I have in years.
I learned that a computer that feels “old” or “slow” isn’t necessarily a bad computer.
Mine has a perfectly usable processor and 32 GB of RAM. Replacing the whole machine would have been unnecessary.
One failing component was making the entire computer feel broken.
And there’s probably a bigger lesson in there somewhere.
How often do we assume the whole thing is broken because one part isn’t working?
How often do we tolerate something that makes everyday life unnecessarily difficult because we’ve gotten used to fighting with it?
How often do we try random fixes instead of slowing down long enough to figure out what’s actually causing the problem?
Yesterday morning I said:
“Why can’t I just USE my computer?”
This morning?
I can.
And I don’t even want to do what I wanted to do in Notion anymore.
😂
Life is fascinating…