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god of hardware, how did i offend thee?

my luck with computer hardware continues.

my computer started throwing bluescreens the other day, pretty much the moment i booted up the tablet pc from work next to it. sulking? maybe. so anyway it's either ram or motherboard, but i don't have enough ram for decent troubleshooting and the motherboard would be too big a pain to replace. off to the shop it goes.

the result? one stick of ram is fucked and the cpu fan "isn't turning". which is one of the strangest ways i've heard someone say 'your cpu fan is fucked'. if it's not turning, it's not doing the one bloody thing it does so i don't know what subtlety i missed there.

anyway, they pull out the dead ram and - after much back and forth - fit a new cpu fan, this new one with a variable speed control in the front of the case. all good, except they didn't give me the plastic facia where the control knob is now. i send an email and get the usual non response. what the hell, i'm not seriously thinking about swapping to the slim control you can fit in a pci slot.

so tonight i boot the machine and it sounds like a cessna. holy crap! twiddle the knob, no change. shut it down, try the alternate controller and lo and behold it's fine. fuck!

so now i have to deal with their warranty return people again. sigh. at the very least i need them to produce the plastic bit to close the hole up and use the small controller at the back; much better would be a replacement controller. ideal would be them just swapping the controller, but i'm sure they'll make me lug the whole case in to verify that the part really has failed. bleh.

Comments

Anonymous Anonymous  

July 05, 2006 12:19 pm

You have my sympathy, but I got you beat on the computer voodoo stakes. In the last five years almost every work computer I've had has suffered critical failures. I had a Dell desktop wherein every single component (except the actual casing was replaced) and it still wouldn't run for more than a couple of hours before crashing (it's probably still floating around your office area as a door stop). The Tecra Laptop I had until late last year went through a hard drive, a motherboard and the RTC chip stopped working. The iMac I have now has just been replaced after 6 months as it just refused to boot one day (although the fan worked - whooooosh). After swapping out the motherboard twice, replacing the RAM, Power Supply and DC controller, Apple simply replaced the whole thing as they had no idea what was wrong with it. Ha Ha.

Blogger 200ok  

July 05, 2006 1:12 pm

Ahh, the Dell Lemon™. I'm pretty sure I used that for a while, it was a GX2? Almost as good as those Compaqs (Deskpro EN or something). At least one of the Compaqs had a bit bootprint on the case by the time we threw them away... percussive maintenance :)

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