negativeZero

Dying hardware

It all started two weeks ago when I had to abandom my study and move my working place to the living room. The study has become my son's room in the mean time. I moved everything work-related away --that is my huge table, notebook(s), computer etc.
Since then I'm having problems with my ADSL connection. Every day this week the modem started to play this weird game after 6PM. It logs into the provider's account and then resets itself. It takes couple of hours until things settle down again. In the meantime one of it's lights blinks at devilish rate. The user's guide says, that if that happens 'something is wrong'. Wow, never would have thought of that. Now I know it's wrong. Sigh, it makes me feel much better.
So I thought, the problem could be in the Telecom (well, they already *are* a problem, so why not ?) so I rang them up and got fed by 'I'll restart your virtual cicuit' and today 'I'll upgrade your virtual circuit'. Wonder if they really know what they do, or have a list of dummy phrases to feed the mortals with. So, I got it restarted and upgraded, yet modem still blinks from 6PM at that paranoid frequency making me feel guilty of torturing it with my childish desire of downloading nightly builds of Netbeans 6.0. Modem, please get well again, I need those builds !!! I wanna see and feel the inline diff
But that's not all: there's this notebook on my table. Sorry, no notebook, it has no battery, so it's a 'desktop computer' . It's not mine, but my clueless' neighbor. The last thingie he did was defragmenting the disk and since that action  things do not work anymore . It boots OK but when it  tries to start ends with a  BSOD followed by a reset so fast that it's not possible to read *what* went wrong. Never mind, I know that 'something is wrong', and obviously do not need to know more.
Besides, it seems that the DVD drive is slowly decaying, making it impossible to boot from other burned medium (like tubbie toasts). I tried trick it,  including booting Knoppix and now XUbuntu, trying to figure out if the HD is working OK. I think not, because Windows ME (right, Milenium Edition, did you know there was something like that ?! I swear to holly penguin it is not mine ! I even never saw a screenshot of that beast. I touched the CD in gloves and wore protection glasses) installer died right after the disk formatting.
"No big deal", you may say. "Is that all?!".
Nope, there's more comming: my phone plays crazy. It calls my wife whenever I'm not watching it. The handsfree set I bought for it lasts only 1 hours instead of adertised 6 and turns on and off as it suits. Usually it turns off during call and turns on at night to discharge. It should last 'up to 160 hours!' in stand-by mode. The night usually has less hours, but enough to get discharged. Oh, and it charges hours, longer than it lasts. And during recharging, you may not use. Well, you may, but not for calling, 'cause it does not work at that time.
There's this scanner on my table too. It works. Unless you re-install it 3 times, or twice with any other hardware , or once with Polish no-name web cam. That's just enough making the piece of plastic tired of the Universe and stops answering any efforts to get pay its share of usefulness.
So, I'm wondering: for years hardware around me was working just fine, most of the time getting out of my way with it's problems. But these days it seems something does not work out. And it seems it is the hardware around *me* (no, that's not Milenium Edition).

Posted at 11:25PM Oct 25, 2006 by bs31 in Personal  |  Comments[1]