Electronic Vibes Mussin' With Our Gear!

To follow up on the last post about the poor iPod, it turns out our laptop has suffered a death of sorts. We bought this Compaq as part of a summer assignment when Mandy and I worked for Hewlitt Packard out of a hotel conference room. They required we have our own computers since we would be working on folding tables and from our homes, they wouldn't be providing computers. We only had one laptop at the time and we didn't think it was up to the task, so we bought a new Compaq Presario from Circuit City for around $1,500. Since purchasing it in April '05 we've had to return it 4 times. The first two were within a week of purchasing it, and those were due to pixel burnouts, which really isn't that uncommon for laptops and they were very accommodating. Incidentally, Circuit City has a great return policy when it comes to laptops--which is why we bought it from them. We returned last winter because it kept randomly rebooting and eventually stopped booting altogether.

When it was returned the work ticket read, "Reinstalled Operating System." We had done that, of course, and it didn't help. Yet, the laptop booted up just fine and worked great until early last week when it completely died again. It showed no symptoms... It had been in perfect working condition three hours before when Mandy was using it. The cause for the death: A dead hard drive. We have a pretty robust back-up policy, so nothing too serious was lost in the crash, but now we have to pack it up again and get, now, our fifth laptop back from the repair shop.

Adding on top of that nonsense, the replaced iPod (twice replaced) from the last post randomly reboots while playing music, so it's back to the shop with that fucker too. Man. I think being at such a high elevation has something to do with our devices dying. It's our closeness to the ionosphere, or something.


PS This is post was written on a our old laptop: Another used Compaq Presario Mandy and I bought from a coworker's friend about four years ago, running Ubuntu Linux, and it works great. Just goes to show... something.

iPod Come and Gone

For a while now I've been singing the praises of Apple, Inc. I love my Mac. It's stable and lovely. And, until recently, I've loved my iPod. They do what I need them to do.

This spring, the left channel of my iPod started going all fuzzy. The channel would come and go, and as time went by it got worse. Keep in mind, this began to happen after nearly two years of continuous use. And by continuous use, I mean nearly every hour of every day the iPod was playing or charging. I figure, on average, it was playing music 8 hours per day. Also, I'm not the most gentle person when it comes to the treatment of gizmos (electronic or otherwise).

With the impending schooner trip coming up, I wanted to have my iPod fully functioning by the time I leave. So, I sent it in for repairs. These repairs are covered under the AppleCare program (read: extended warranty). I sent the iPod in, and today received a brand new one as a replacement.

I had just begun to sing further praises of Apple when I tried to boot up the brand new iPod. The silver apple of death appeared against a black background and would not budge. I tried all manor of tricks to get it to boot, to no avail. I called Apple again to tell them my replacement needed to be replaced. Mandy, the slueth she is, discovered a Mac store near our apartment. I told the person that I wanted to bring the iPod to the store instead of waiting for the return box to arrive, send it back, then wait for another possible lemon to arrive.

In short, we drove to the store, showed the iPod to a Mac Genius (how arrogant is that?) and got a replacement that actually works.

I'm still singing the praises of Apple because I love the iPod and its reliability. I hope that them sending out broken iPods as replacements for broken iPods is rare and isolated incident. Either way, my music is playing out of both speakers and I'm happy as can be.

You Can't put the Smoke Back In

The saga of my sad PC continues. Tonight, I replaced my old power supply with one Kleiner-One-Niner gave me (what a guy). I unplugged all the cables on my old one, unscrewed it, and yanked it out. I fastened the new one to the case, plugged all the cable back in, and hit the power button. Crackling sounds and smoke began to pour out of the case. I yanked the plug from the back and inspected the damage.

It turns out, I plugged a cable in the wrong way. It was a small, four-pin power cable that ran to my front-side sound panel. Normally, these plugs have guide wings that force the inattentive user to plug in the cable one way only. Sadly, this card doesn't have any and I was the inattentive user. When I plugged the cable in, I was off by one pin... and that one pin apparently didn't like being left out.

The worst part about all this is the power supply doesn't fix the problem I was having. The computer still randomly reboots and sometimes won't even post when being powered on. More investigation is necessary...

The damage:

(Click for a close look)