Is It Naptime Yet

Our house has a lot of static electricity at certain times of the year, Fall and Spring. I would often shock the computer when I went to turn it on. Well a while back I guess I gave it quite a shock because it wouldn’t turn on. I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it turned on like a charm. Ever since that day it has become increasingly harder to turn on. We finally decided to just keep it on 24/7 because sitting on the floor unplugging and plugging it back in for 15 minutes wasn’t worth it. Since that time we’ve had a couple instances where we’ve had to turn it off or there was a power outage. It took Jon at least half an hour to turn it on the last time and it took me all morning today. I would sit and try to turn it on for about 30 minutes and then give up since I had to do dishes, laundry and feed my girls breakfast.
Each time I pushed the button it was like gambling. “Please turn on baby, please give me what I want.” It even teased me to the point where it gave the monitor power and beeped as though it would start but it just shut down after that. I was very frustrated. I work on it a little after lunch today and it finally came on. Now I just hope we have very few storms because I am not turning this sucker off. My thumb started to hurt from griping the plug.
We’re not sure what’s wrong with it. Howard had some gadget that told us if it was the power supply and we hoped it was something that simple. Turns out it wasn’t. They think it might be the motherboard. She must have gotten ornery from all my shocks and now likes to make us suffer.
All I know is the computer is a pain in the butt to turn on if it gets turned off. I turned it off due to lighting storms last night, but I’m almost willing to take a bet that we won’t be hit by lightening as long as I don’t have to go through this morning again, because I have a feeling the next time it may take all day to turn it on, or may not turn on ever again.
We’re afraid it would be expensive to fix or that we’d just have to buy a new computer. Not that we spent a lot on this one. We had windows 98 so we just loaded that up, in which the software is the bulk of any new computer. I think we spent $400 and it’s lasted about 3 years. I guess you get what you pay for. I just don’t want to lose my connection to the outside world for more than a few days. Please continue to live computer please live!!