Sunday, January 18, 2015

Proud Owner of One (1) Brick

Which would be great, except that brick used to be my computer.  Taking it in  tomorrow, and hopefully everything is good after that.  Otherwise I'm stuck with just this phone, and  just getting this post going has taken 11 minutes so far... I'm old and bad at technology, I guess.

Hopefully, we'll be  back in business come Wednesday.



UPDATE: I need to get my motherboard hard drive, which is not the same thing but my annoyance stands, replaced.  The computer's a year and a half old, and it needs a new motherboard.  Really?  Really?

Anyway, the good news is that, until I get that fixed, I've borrowed an older desktop from a friend, on which I'm writing this.  It's not much, but it should be plenty for my day-to-day purposes for the time being--including, most importantly, writing reviews.

8 comments:

  1. If not, we're putting together a Kickstarter to get you a new computer. We need our fix!

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  2. What phone is it? Might have voice to text, so beyond feeling like a knob when talking to it you'll be able to make posts easily enough.

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    1. 's a good suggestion, and my phone can kinda-sorta do that as long as I don't mind going back and fixing everything it misheard (or that I missaid, if you want to give it the benefit of the doubt). I've got a keyboard now, luckily, but maybe if this happens again that'll be the way to go!

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    2. If it's an android phone, you ought to be able to hook up an optical mouse and wireless keyboard to it. Just look up online how to.

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  3. Good thing you don't have 50 million bricks, or else your house would collapse.

    As a computer guy, "a new motherboard" sounds... off. Those don't usually brick (indeed, they're usually what cheap out on.)

    This is the part where you explain why you believe the motherboard needs replacing and ask questions.

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    1. Correction: I don't need a new motherboard, I need a new hard drive, which I may have kinda thought were the same thing. Just looked that up; they're not.

      Luckily, I'm not the one trying to fix this, as I obviously know nothing about computers. Also luckily, I enlisted my dad (who DOES know something about computers!) to help me make sure I didn't get jobbed at the outset. Never go to a car dealership without an automotive buddy, and never go to a computer store without a techie.

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    2. Sounds good! Hard drives are definitely a thing that'll brick in the first year. And, since you're working with your dad, you're probably going to wind up with an SSD; modern SSD's are an order of magnitude faster and more reliable than HDD's and I'm assuming you don't need a full 120 GB of storage.

      (Protip: many PC manufacturers will sell you systems with many gigabytes of storage and RAM, because it's relatively cheap to make these numbers get big and look like you're getting a good bang-for-your-buck. In reality, as long as you have enough storage and RAM, adding more does essentially nothing for you. However, if you use < 100 GB of storage, paying 10 times as much per gig and getting a 120 GB SSD instead of a 1 TB HDD will result in an extremely meaningful performance delta. High speed RAM, however, is almost certainly not worth the price premium.)

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