Cav's Place

Sent that HDD to the shop last Monday and it seems that what I heard about their warranty services is quite true. The contract states that they must inform the client of the cause of the malfunction and the method chosen to solve the problem (repair, replace or refund) at most ten days after receiving the defective product, yet they only said they decided to replace it on Friday, which is 12 days after receiving the product, or at least 11 days if you don’t count that Monday. Still no information about exactly what happened to it though. Either way, they said they were waiting for a HDD to replace it with and it should come next week, which means Wednesday at the earliest for me because dad is on a trip until then and he won’t be able to go and pick it up in case they somehow get their hands on one earlier.
Meanwhile, I tried using dad’s old computer, the one that apparently died some months ago and was set aside somewhere because dad was thinking to take it to work and replace the ancient one he has in his office. That’s because I took it apart back then, after ordering the parts for a new computer for him, found dust under the CPU, cleaned it, put it back together, tried to start it again and noticed that it worked, so I thought it might have been just the dust after all. But now it’s obvious that it wasn’t just the dust, because it couldn’t give me more than nine more days. Worked reasonably enough until Tuesday night, but then it crashed once again, just like before. I took it apart again, looked for any new “developments”, put it back together, pressed the button and noticed that it somehow did come back to life. But that was apparently the last of it; it had nothing left to give me on Wednesday. I don’t know whether the main culprit is the CPU or the motherboard or both, and have some suspicions about the power supply on top of that, but at least now we know it’s useless. I guess the RAM and the CD drive could be given away to someone who still has need of something so old, but everything else is pretty much dead and buried.
So I then moved on to what I should have done from the beginning but initially decided not to because I was hoping I’d have a HDD again within a few days and it’d be more trouble than it’d be worth. I put the HDD from that old computer, which is actually the one I got after I sent the last one that failed to be replaced, in 2007, on my own, more or less dangling somewhere under the DVD drive since this computer’s only IDE cable won’t give me any other options. Then I tried installing Vista on it, only to notice that my DVD drive wasn’t working. I took dad’s drive to do the job, then started wondering what could be wrong with mine, since it never caused any problems before, and decided that it could simply be dust gathered inside because it hadn’t been used in a year and a half. Then also noticed that the button located above my mouse’s wheel, which I set as the middle button, ended up being quite stuck after being unused while I was using dad’s old computer, since I didn’t bother installing the proper driver on it.
Either way, I installed Vista well enough, using a DVD drive placed on some boxes next to the computer and a HDD dangling inside it, because my DVD drive seems to be quite stuck inside my case so I couldn’t remove it in order to replace it with dad’s and taking the IDE cable out of the computer would have required removing the video card, which I didn’t feel like doing. Then I also installed the drivers, service packs, updates and important programs, which means I now have the proper kits downloaded as well, making it easier to do this all over again next week. In fact, aside from having a somewhat slower HDD which is also placed somewhat improperly (in the sense that it’s not fixed in place, because otherwise it’s sitting quite straight), I’m pretty much back to “normal”. My DVD drive started working well again as well, after I just kept the tray open a little and blew air inside as hard as I could a few times, so I guess it really was just dust. My mouse still seems to have some small issues, so now I’m wondering if it’s something new or I just didn’t notice it before, but the major problem was solved after about 20-25 clicks.
So now I wait for next week and hope that the new HDD won’t be as faulty as the old one. Then again, considering what I see written about this particular model, I should first hope that it won’t be faulty from day one and then be careful with the backup… Needless to say, I’m quite worried. I’m also wondering what kind of HDD I should plan to get for my next computer, because they seem to fail quite often in recent years and a HDD failure can be worse than the failure of any other component, seeing as you can’t exactly send the potential lost data to be replaced as well…

At least I’m alone for a few days, since they both left. As long as nothing goes wrong, it’s certainly less bad like this, but I still don’t feel like doing much of anything. Little point in doing anything when you can’t have any of the things that truly matter to you, plus that having problems with my computer, which is the only material possession that’s important to me in itself, certainly does nothing to improve my mood… But I’ll see what I’ll manage to do these days, because it’ll certainly be worse once they’ll be back.