Guest Author - Gary King

I will be adding a new bowling article within a day or two, as soon as I get everything running again. I was working on an article last night on my E Machine when I decided to add a program and put the CD in the CD Rom drive. About one minute after I did that, the drive started making a terrible loud noise and BANG!…..the CD disintegrated in the drive. I thank God the drive was enclosed or I could have been hurt. There were pieces of that CD all over the place and luckily, most were contained in the CD Rom drive.

I followed the instructions to take the system cover off and then removed the drive from the system in order to remove the four screws holding the top of the drive on. I then turned it over and dumped all the pieces out, and there were a lot of them. Then I put the cover back on, put the drive back in the system and plugged everything in and started the system.

The light for the drive works but it will not open completely without a little help. It will close okay, but the drive will also not read Cds, so it is actually not working correct.

The phone systems used by all manufacturers now make it almost impossible to actually talk to a representative where the computers are made, so I have no way of notifying them there is a problem. And believe me, this could be a safety factor, especially when children are working with computers. So if you have kids with their own computers, check out their systems to make sure they are running okay.

I tell you this because it will delay my next article. I am making sure my system is operating correct and everything is okay. The driver for the CD Rom probably needs to be installed again, which I have yet to figure out how, and if I have it in the system. BUT, something could have shorted out, or whatever, which caused that to happen. I have never heard of it happening before. But it makes me wonder if CD Players out there could do the same thing and if other computer systems could have that happen. In any case, we need better safeguards on computers systems that are mass marketed. We need safeguards and assurances we are safe and our children are safe and our Cds will not BLOW UP or DISINTEGRATE in the drives.

I thank God I am a Senior and when things like this happen, it makes me wonder where and when will our products once again receive the kind of quality control they should have? They tell us to buy American but when we do, we end up on the short end of the stick with something that either works half the time or does not work. But when we buy something made in Japan and elsewhere, they seem to work ALL THE TIME!

I see a society that is beginning to look a lot like a place we used to call Roman Empire. And we all know what happened to that Empire?

My CD blew up in my CD Rom and created a big problem, but I will return with more bowling articles. But first, I am going to look for a GOOD, DECENT, RELIABLE computer system that works like a computer should, not like a science fiction toy which never made it to the end of the line. Maybe the people who created the E Machines should have called them the C Machines, with C standing for CONFUSED!