By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 11.27.07]
My abject apologies. Right in the middle of writing and publishing the series on the 4 Fantastic Films, my laptop punked out.
My tech skills are pretty rusty, and it was the day after Thanksgiving. I immediately thought: has to be the hard drive. Quick get on craigslist, 2 hours later a meeting at a Starbucks and problem solved? Not quite.
When I bought this Dell Inspiron 2 years ago, I added a 1-year on-site warranty. That was good because it failed immediately. Error messages saying the “module” wouldn’t seat onto the motherboard – which module? The only modules I had was the CD-R or the hard drive, but Dell Support instructed their sub-contractors to replace the motherboard instead – and they had to do it 3 different times.
So, twice, in a Starbucks, and once, in an empty trash-strewn 2-room office about a block from Ground Zero, I watched and learned. Now, it was my turn.
Layer by layer I pulled the Inspiron apart – first the hard drive, then the DVD-R (a free upgrade for all my “trouble,” evidently the problem in the first place). Then, keyboard, screen, modem.
Finally, I got down to the fan housing and pulled it away from the copper heat sink that lead to the covering over the cpu.
A thick layer of black dirt and hairs was clogging the heat sink! I’d wondered why the fan was working so extra hard at the end of the summer. The chip was fried.
Oh well. The guy who’d sold me the hard drive had thrown in an external drive casing, and kind relatives had donated an old desktop. No data lost . . . just a dead laptop.
A quick search on eBay and I’d bid and won a new chip from a company in Georgia – I’ll be portable again in another week.
The desktop was wrecked – old SIMM, funky hard drives (WARNING: IBM hard drives are defective, that’s why they went out of the hard drive biz in 2002). All I had to do now was completely rebuild the operating system and install all the programs I use daily (Office, Photoshop, etc.).
4 false starts later, I’m up and running. Then a jillion upgrades, service packs and patches more, and finally, I’m done.
The documentaries are worth seeing and definitely worth writing about. I’ll start up again tomorrow. Stay tuned for the 60s and the age of Reich (below).
My tech skills are pretty rusty, and it was the day after Thanksgiving. I immediately thought: has to be the hard drive. Quick get on craigslist, 2 hours later a meeting at a Starbucks and problem solved? Not quite.
When I bought this Dell Inspiron 2 years ago, I added a 1-year on-site warranty. That was good because it failed immediately. Error messages saying the “module” wouldn’t seat onto the motherboard – which module? The only modules I had was the CD-R or the hard drive, but Dell Support instructed their sub-contractors to replace the motherboard instead – and they had to do it 3 different times.
So, twice, in a Starbucks, and once, in an empty trash-strewn 2-room office about a block from Ground Zero, I watched and learned. Now, it was my turn.
Layer by layer I pulled the Inspiron apart – first the hard drive, then the DVD-R (a free upgrade for all my “trouble,” evidently the problem in the first place). Then, keyboard, screen, modem.
Finally, I got down to the fan housing and pulled it away from the copper heat sink that lead to the covering over the cpu.
Oh well. The guy who’d sold me the hard drive had thrown in an external drive casing, and kind relatives had donated an old desktop. No data lost . . . just a dead laptop.
A quick search on eBay and I’d bid and won a new chip from a company in Georgia – I’ll be portable again in another week.
The desktop was wrecked – old SIMM, funky hard drives (WARNING: IBM hard drives are defective, that’s why they went out of the hard drive biz in 2002). All I had to do now was completely rebuild the operating system and install all the programs I use daily (Office, Photoshop, etc.).
4 false starts later, I’m up and running. Then a jillion upgrades, service packs and patches more, and finally, I’m done.
The documentaries are worth seeing and definitely worth writing about. I’ll start up again tomorrow. Stay tuned for the 60s and the age of Reich (below).
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