Anyone who knows me is aware that I am unafraid of speaking to a group of people. I am also unafraid of admitting when I don’t know something, but as a beginning computer user, I was afraid I might ruin the computer if I did something wrong, so at first, I was very tenuous about doing very much with it. I played Solitaire and Minesweeper, I experimented with drawing pictures in Paint, and even though I didn’t have a printer, I tried writing in WordPad, but that was about the extent of my willingness to risk the destruction of my PC.

Quite by accident however, I overcame my fear of the machine, when, for no apparent reason, the display on my screen suddenly dropped to 16 colors. I found myself looking at a black, purple, chartreuse, and white screen!

I started poking around in the Control Panel, trying to find a setting I could change to fix whatever had gone wrong. I looked at Display settings but had no luck there. Since it already was not working properly, I figured I truly couldn’t hurt it, so I began looking at some of the other Control Panel items such as Power Options, Date and Time, System, Folder Options, Keyboard, Mouse, Add Hardware, Add/Remove Programs, and Taskbar and Start Menu. I found that I could personalize a great many things about the interface to suit myself.

As it turned out, the video card had decided it didn’t want to play nicely with the monitor. At the time, I didn’t realize that was the problem, so I just started trying to find a solution. I didn’t succeed in repairing my display problem until I got a new monitor, but I wasn’t afraid of the computer anymore.

What I learned from the experience, and the moral of the story, was what I had already been told, but hadn’t understood:

“It is just a machine and you can’t hurt it by using it.”