My parents always used to tell me that bad things came in threes. When I thought about it there was always 2 other bad things that would’ve happened around the same time so it seemed to make sense. Of course it’s just a convenient way of rationalising away coincidences as something bad will always end up happening to you and the rule is so loose that those three things could cover quite a large time period. Still yesterday seemed to be one of those days where I had at least three things go completely tits up on me in quick succession, sullying what would have been otherwise quite a cheerful day. The common thread of this whole debacle was of course computers; the one thing I get paid to be an expert on are most often the cause of my troubles.
The day started off pretty well. My MacBook Pro had arrived yesterday and I cheerfully went down to the depot to pick it up. A quick chat and a signature later I had my shiny new toy which I was all too eager to get my hands onto. There was enough for me to do at work that I wasn’t completely bored yet I had enough time to not feel pressured about anything. A few good emails from close friends ensured that my not-so-secret project was on track to actually be useful to some people, rather than just me deluding myself into thinking that. It all came undone about 15 minutes before I was about to leave work and cascaded on from there.
Part of the environment I’m responsible for went, for lack of a better word, completely berko. People couldn’t access machines whilst others just refused to start. After spending an hour trying various solutions I knew that I wouldn’t solve this problem within the next 3 hours so I decided to set up some things that would hopefully get the system to rectify itself and ran out the door as quickly as I could. After getting stuck in traffic for nearly an hour I was finally at home and ready to unbox my prize that I had been waiting a long time for, and it was well worth it.
Whilst I’ll do a full review of the MacBook Pro a little later (once I’ve got to know it better) I will say that it’s quite a slick piece of hardware. After fooling around in OSX for all of 20 minutes I fired up BootCamp and started the unholy process of installing Windows 7 on it. To Apple’s credit this process was quite smooth and in under an hour from first unboxing it I was up and running without a single hiccup along the way. After declaring that a success I decided that I should reward myself with a little Starcraft 2, and that’s when my PC got jealous.
You see I have a rather… chequered record when it comes to my personal PCs. They almost always have their quirks in one way or another, usually from me either doing something to them or not bothering to fix or replace a certain piece of hardware. My current desktop is no exception and up until recently it randomly suffered from a hard drive that would erase the MBR every so often along with being slow as a wet dog in molasses. Before that it was memory problems that would cause it lock up not 10 seconds into any game and before that it was a set of 8800GTs that would work most of the time then repeatedly crash for no apparent reason. Anyone who talked to me about it knew I had a habit of threatening the PC into working which seemed to work surprisingly often. I wasn’t above parading around the gutted corpses of its former companions as a warning to my PC should it not behave, much to the puzzlement of my wife.
For the most part though the last couple months have been pretty good. Ever since upgrading the drives in my PC to 2 Samsung Spinpoint F3s (faster than Raptors and cost almost nothing) I’ve had a pretty good run with the issues only being software related. The past few days though my PC has decided to just up and shut itself down randomly without so much of a hint as to what went wrong. Initially I thought it was overheating so I upped the fan speeds and everything seemed to run smoothly again. Last night however saw the same problem happen again (right in the middle of a game no less) but the PC failed to recover afterwards, not even wanting to POST.
You could say that it was serendipitous that I managed to get myself a new laptop just as my PC carked it but to me it just feels like my trouble child PC throwing a jealousy fit at the new arrival in the house. My server and media PC both know that I won’t take any of that sort of shenanigans from them as I’ll gut one of them to fix the other should the need arise. My PC on the other hand seems to know that no matter how much shit it drags me through I’ll always come crawling back with components in hand, hoping to revive it.
My house is a testament to that adage that a mechanic’s car will always be on the verge of breaking down. My PC deciding to die last night was frustrating but it then also let me indulge in some good old fashion hardware ogling, filling my head with dreams of new bits of hardware and what joys they may bring. My quick research into the problem has shown there will probably be an easy fix so it’s not all bad. Still at 10:00PM last night part of my head was still screaming the rule of three at me, but I managed to drown that out with some good beer and an episode of Eureka.
Now to prepare the sacrificial motherboard for the ritual tonight… 😀
