radiac.net

It's my birthday today! I'm 25 now. I can no longer tick the questionnaire box that says 18-24. Still, at least i'm having an excellent day! Details later :)

I've just realised it's 10 years to the day that I first heard the dulcet tones of my 56k modem dialing in to Force 9, so it's my 10th internet birthday today, and my 25th real life birthday on Saturday (thanks for all the comments!)

I had an awesome real-life birthday over the weekend - Leela took me to London, we stayed in a fancy hotel, saw Chicago, went on the London Eye and to the natural history, science and imperial war museums, visited the Tate modern, wandered along Oxford street (although couldn't find anything to buy?!) and got accosted by someone from Oxfam while we were trying to eat lunch in Regents Park. Again, I have lots of photos, will put them online soon.

As I mentioned at the start of the year, my shiny monitor has a broken power button, which - as all monitor aficionados will know - is the most important button. However, I have a 3 year monitor replacement contract, so I rang up Dell and the new one should be arriving today.

Excellent news, in theory. A bit overkill if you ask me, replacing the whole thing for a broken bit of plastic, but you know me - I'm not one to complain.

The only thing is, my replacement is probably going to be a dirty stinkin' refurb. That makes me a bit nervous for a start - what if they didn't really fix the problem? And it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it might be an older revision than mine, with all of the associated problems, such as banding. On top of that, I'm risking the whole dead pixel thing all over again - they'll only replace it if there are 3 dead pixels next to each other.

So, my perfect-apart-from-one-button monitor is in its box, and I'm wondering if I'm making an expensive mistake. I'd fix this screen myself, but it would invalidate my warranty that's still got 2 years to go. Seems a bit risky.

Oh well - only time will tell if this is the right thing. I know you'll all be waiting with baited breath - I will keep you posted.

Edit: Oh dear, and now my laptop hard drive is clicking ominously...

So my replacement screen arrived yesterday. I boxed up my old screen first thing in the morning before I started work, and spent most of the day on my laptop - but more on that later.

The guy rolled up at about 4pm, but the return label was on the new box, so we had to unpack my old screen and put it in the box the new one came in. Bit ridiculous, but I can see the sense in it. It all happened so fast - he had it packed and in his van before I'd barely had a chance to check the new model number.

So, what of the new monitor? I unwrapped it, plugged it in, turned it on, watched the machine boot up with sadness, for right there, right in the center, about 1/3 of the way up the screen, was a dead pixel. I also noted that the instructions were in german - yes, that's right kids, my screen belonged to the germans. What's more, when I checked the sticker on the back, it looks like I've stepped back a couple of revision numbers, from a version D to a B - according to the internet, a poor screen with many visual problems.

But you know what? Turns out that with my poor eyesight, I actually can't tell the difference. Either that, or there's no problem; perhaps I got lucky, or someone sent it back and they replaced the errant board with a new one.

More to the point, thanks to my fluent german (nein, ich habe keine igelburger), I was able to swap the menus back to English in no time at all.

And the dead pixel? On closer inspection, it turned out to be a fleck of polystyrene.

So, all in all, a good experience. I now effectively have an identical monitor to before, only with a working power button, at very little disruption to myself. I'm pretty happy with Dell's replacement service; A+++++++, will buy again.

My Vaio Z1XMP is approaching its fourth birthday, but sadly it doesn't look like it'll make it.

Over those four years it has picked up its fair share of minor blemishes - the plastic wrist rest area has come away, the screen has been pressed too hard at some point, so isn't a consistent brightness. Little things, like the broken space bar spring. Then there were the inherent problems, like lack of CPU power or lack of screen brightness when on battery. Or that it gets so hot it actually burns my legs if I don't put it on a table. Or - and this is my personal favourite - that I become electrically charged and can continuously electrocute people while I have the laptop on my lap. These are problems, to be true, but nothing I can't work around, and nothing serious enough to warrant replacing it.

The first real problem I faced about 8 months ago was lack of ram. I upgraded to 1GB, which helped, but I need to run 4 linux VMs at the same time as Flash, Word and five browsers; 1GB doesn't cut it. The machine often spends half its time writing swap and churning the hard drive.

Which was the next problem. The hard drive started clicking gently about 6 months ago, and is now clicking a bit more each day. Only a matter of time.

Then there is the power cable, which I think is broken. In certain positions it works fine; the rest of the time, my laptop swaps between battery and cpu about 10 times a second. I'm sure it's not helping the battery.

Ah, yes. The battery. All of those problems I would be happy to overlook, if it wasn't for the battery.

It squeaks.

There's no other way to describe it; I noticed that while it's charging, it has started squeaking intermittently; it'll squeak every ~750ms for about 10 seconds, then go quiet again. Then start up again. And the other day when I turned it off, it continued squeaking. For about a minute.

I think that's a bad thing. Like a "the lithium cells are doing stuff they shouldn't be doing, like expanding and contracting, and one of these days they're going to expand too much and explode, raining burning laptop bits down upon me, and setting fire to the train in the process" bad thing.

Add it all up, and I think there's only one option: get a new laptop. Now I just have to decide which one. I want something powerful but fairly light, so it's currently between a Dell XPS M1330, a Toshiba Portege R500 (although they've had mixed reviews), and *gasp* a Macbook Pro (it's ok, you can run windows on them). Any comments or suggestions?

Hope everyone has had a good easter! But seriously, where did those four days go? More to the point, where did all that chocolate go?