And on Wednesday…
The computer gods truly are pissed off at me for some reason. I’m not sure what I’ve done to annoy them but I wish they would get over it. I’ve had no impure thoughts about Macs. I’ve felt no sinful urges to install Linux, lately. I properly drool over the newest video cards and bow to their power. I’ve even cleaned the user slime off a few keyboards last week.
Whatever it is though, they decided to mess with me at work. Not sure why I forgot to post about this earlier. Oh wait I know… my work laptop blew up. Well OK not really. But the video card is toast in that laptop. I get dotted lines through the POST display and Windows XP splash screen and then it garbles and then goes blank. Normal mode, Safe mode, with an external monitor… no change in results. The card is fried.
And of course being a notebook (even a 20-something pound notebook Dell XPS M1710) means that the 512MB 7900GT video card is still a part of the mainboard and will probably mean the whole thing gets replaced. Now luckily, I had enabled Remote Desktop on it a week ago to try accessing it from home so I wouldn’t have to bring it home with me anymore. And since it is just the video card that is failing, the rest of the PC works fine. So I was able to Remote into it and transfer all my data off of it to an external drive. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s never ever leave your data in the hands of a service technician.
And of course since it’s Lunar New Year, they couldn’t come out to fix it. It was Wednesday when I got transferred to a service center in Mainland China where they pretty much ONLY spoke Mandarin. After a very long conversation, I was able to get them to have a local engineer call me to setup a time to come fix it. They finally called me and Monday was the first time they could come. I figured as much. So they’ll be here today between 12pm and 4pm to look at my computer and find out what the problem is because I can guarantee that the Chinese guy I spoke with did NOT get the diagnosis right since he didn’t even understand the word “video”. At the very least I need a whole new mainboard. At worst they’ll need to swap my PC out for another one. Neither of which I expect to see in the hands of the tech when he arrives.
You mean, you couldn’t fix it yourself? :P
that sucks man. I’d hate to have to worry about that right now. :/
I could have fixed it if I had a bunch of Dell XPS M1710 spare parts just lying about. But that’s fairly impossible. And it would have voided my warranty.