Last night while I was having a blast meeting my kids’ teachers, my beloved Dell Inspiron E1505 was busy bricking.
A 10pm phone call to Dell support resulted in a wiped hard drive and the total paperweighting of a once great machine.
This morning I ran out and bought the cheapest thing I could find which was a Compaq Presario C700. Funny: it was so cheap yet it’s got scads more space, twice as much memory and is oodles faster than the Dell.
All that and I’m still upset. I lost some files but not a whole lot. I use an online backup service for everything important. Spent almost $500 that I didn’t need to spend and that is depressing, but I have so many jobs now that it’s not a bank breaker. Stretcher, but not a breaker.
I think I’m upset that I had really invested in that computer and even though it was starting to slow down, it worked very well. I think the hard drive is damaged because we couldn’t get it to load the windows reinstallation disk that came with it! Or perhaps that new iTunes version was borking XP as well as Vista.
Speaking of Vista, it’s what I’m stuck with using now. I couldn’t find anything with XP on it.
I’ll get over it. Eventually.
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September 12, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Rick
Funny you should mention something about that machine. I think you and I have the same Dell that we bought at about the same time. Mine’s still clicking away just fine, but of course those things can change on a dime. I have been amazed that, as fast as mine is, it still takes a while to load Vista and whatever other software Dell felt I needed. I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu, which is an easily-installed version of Linux, and I’ve given some serous thought about putting it on to that machine. I’ve been using a cd version of Ubuntu, and I’m finding that I can do everything in that operating system that I can in Vista, and then some. If you have a hard drive issue, though, that might be a problem. Is it not still under warranty? Hopefully you can put a new hard drive in that thing and get it up and running again. Let me know if you’re interested in the Ubuntu option. You can always uninstall it and load in Vista again if you don’t like it.
September 12, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Jim
I think it’s a hard drive issue and it is under warranty because I bought an extended one. The problem is that it’s going to take a couple of weeks to resolve this, just because of having to ship stuff back and forth, and I can’t be without a computer for that long.
I don’t think I was conscious of the fact that I use this thing for almost every work related thing I do (except deliver mail).