Sunday, April 5, 2009

Ken vs. the Computer - Round One

. . . and in this corner, weighing in at 2.8 GHz, the five year old HP Pavillion a350n on loan from June and Smitty, with upgraded memory, hard drive, video, and video capture.

Round 1: After years of trouble free operation (well, as trouble free as you can get when running Windows), we started getting spurious resets, failures to boot, and some strange whirring sounds coming from the hard drive. It seemed like a classic case of <diagnosis 1> hard drive failure</diagnosis>, and so I drop by the local office supply store and pick up the smallest (and cheapest) HD on the shelf, which happens to be four times the capacity of the original, and twice that of the failing one. I was hopeful to get the operating system and data off the failing drive, but if not, I had a backup of the data on an external drive.

At this point, I have to make the decision to fight, or just throw in the towel and buy a new desktop, which can be had for as little as $300 these days. June's computer, however, was top of the line when new, and is still equal to what that $300 would get us. And, you know how I hate to see anything go to junkyard that just needs a little TLC (see "Roise, the Car Whose Name We Don't Mention" and "The Grand Caravan Tranny Fiasco of 2006").

This looks to be a short fight, with the computer trouble going down in the first round, but that wouldn't be very blog worthy, would it? Tune in next time . . .

2 comments:

Eldon and Janeil Olsen said...

You're amazing. I knew you were gritting your teeth when I bought my new Apples, but at least you got a malfunctioning laptop out of it.

Imagitext said...

You should just buy a cheap laptop with internet for Libby and Ann and put it there. Everyone else has a computer.