His dad nodded, not understanding, and tapped the monitor. “Good. Now print last month’s tax report.”

Reply. Reply. Reply.

He clicked. The program scanned the dead hardware. One by one, the exclamation marks lit up in the software’s own list: Network controller. PCI Simple Communications Controller. SM Bus Controller. High Definition Audio.

Now Leo had installed the fresh OS from the original CD. Windows 7 sat clean and pristine on the SSD, but the Device Manager was a graveyard of yellow exclamation marks. No Ethernet. No audio. No USB 3.0. The machine was a brain without senses. And without the network driver, he couldn’t get online to download anything else.