Will I ever encounter a computer that just works? March 17, 2008
Posted by Sharny in : Life, Rants, Technology , trackbackComputers. Wonderful things. The main issue however, is that they never seem to actually work. I have never encountered a single computer that didn’t have something wrong with it, some weird behavior, something it did that made no sense or something that just didn’t work. A few times I’ve been able to quite happily put this down to the age of the machine or the fact that it’s components just weren’t that good. But that has stopped working.
I got my current computer for the Christmas before last, it was a very exciting moment for me, the first time I had ever gotten a computer all for myself and one that was good enough to play the games I wanted to play and do the things I wanted to do. Things didn’t exactly start off well when the video card that came with it was faulty, oh well, back to the shop with that. They replaced it free of charge and I also bought and had them install another 512MB stick of RAM as it only had the one at the time. Things were lovely for quite some time after that, everything seemed to be working fine. I started playing World of Warcraft and it could handle that no problem.
Then things start going wrong. I have honestly no idea what caused it but WoW just started crashing the computer all the time, just causing it to instantly restart. It would only happen when playing WoW (save for I think one time) and almost always when loading a new zone. Windows had about as much idea of what was going on as I did, giving a range of complete crap as to what has caused it, none of which made much sense and sounded very vague and unhelpful. I cut down a bit on my at home WoW playing as it just got too irritating having it just crash all the time. Originally I thought over heating could be to blame (as according to a temperature monitor I installed things were running pretty hot in there) and thought maybe cleaning inside could help but it didn’t, this weren’t actually very dusty in there at all in fact. I came up with a sort of semi-fix for when it restarted the computer, this was essentially to unplug it before it started up and then plug back in and start up properly. Once started I would close all the situational processes I never use and open very little else on the computer. This seemed to work.
More recently an even stranger thing started happening. Something in my computer started rattling. The first time I turned my computer on to hear this I freaked out, since rattling inside the case is generally not a good sign. I did discover, however, that this noise didn’t seem to have any effect on the actual operation of the computer, which led me to turn the computer off and open it up to see if I could find the cause. Once I got in there everything just looked completely normal but upon turning the computer on again the rattling started once more, seemingly coming from the power supply. Over the next few days I worked out that it probably rattles according to the heat, when the computer is cold (eg when turned on after being off during the night) it is really loud and as the computer warms up it gets quieter until it becomes silent. A quick Google search reveals other people with similar problems generally getting told to replace their fans, at the moment I’m not sure what I’m going to do, if it were rattling all the time it would make sense to me but the heat dependency thing is just really weird…
Just to make things worse my computer is being crashed by WoW even more now, even with all excess process closed, iTunes not running (or any program for that matter) it crashed 3 times whilst zoning so far today. It basically makes the game unplayable and given that my friends are away home is the only place I can get my WoW hit during this first week of the easter holidays. At the moment it is kinda working but I can’t really guarantee anything at the moment which is pretty annoying.
To return to my title a bit, a few other examples of computer failings include my friend’s new Dell which is only a few months old but is already suffering from a failing hard drive and intermittent blue screens, their older one which has a good few error messages upon start up (but otherwise works alright-ish) and their oldest which, following a recent format and clean inside the case, cannot be relied upon to do anything more than browse the internet.
In essence, this point is pretty pointless as I don’t imagine that computers will ever stop failing on me or anyone else. Ever. Ultimately, I’m just going to have to put up with not having a computer for a few days whilst presumably some parts get replaced and hopefully sort out my problems without a format and really get used to it (although it’s not really like I’m not used to it already, given the number of formats our previous computer had).
It would just be nice if, for once, something worked…
Tagged as: Computers, Life, Rants, Technology
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