Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies®

Part I. What the @#$%&*!?

In this part ...

How old is the oldest working computer? It's difficult to obtain an answer. I suppose some primal fear prevents one of those dusty old vacuum tube behemoths from the 1940s and 1950s from being powered up in their cozy museum displays. In fact, there probably isn't an electrical grid available today that can handle 13 million vacuum tubes coming to life at once.

Certainly there are old PCs, some still used in back offices around the world. But no, the computer that has been working the longest cannot be found on planet Earth. That's because the world's oldest continually operating computer is found onboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is some 10 billion miles away from the sun.

After more than 30 years of continuous operation, the Voyager computer is definitely a record holder, but it's not without problems of its own. Specifically, it's so old that it's difficult to maintain the ancient Earth-based computers that communicate with Voyager. So, frankly, there's really no such thing as the eternal, flawless computer. PC fatality is inevitable. Computers wheeze. They crash. They die. The chapters in this part of the book show you how to deal with it.