Thu 31 Jul 2008

Good As I Wanna Be

Posted in This, that and the other at 0:05

I feel good today, so I don’t want to re-live all the PC trouble I had last week. But sometimes, people visit the blog as a result of some comment I made about finding and fixing problems, and in hopes that some of my experience will help, here goes:

- The first big problem was that when I pressed the power button, it wouldn’t even begin to boot up, and an amber light began to blink on the front of the case. The Dell manual said that meant a problem with an installed device, one of the pieces inside the case, possibly the DVD burner, or the CD drive, maybe even the motherboard.

Google led me to this blog, where they narrowed it down to a bent USB port, a dead CMOS battery, or dust. The ports looked fine, the battery did too, and so sure enough, after using compressed air to clear away all the dust (and cat hair), things booted up normally once more.

- Along the way, I read in Consumer Reports that if the PC is more than 4 years old (which ours is), don’t even bother paying to fix it, just buy a new one. Well, we get a good deal of information from CR, but right now we’re not ready to spend that kind of money for the PC or the time to replace programs that don’t work with Vista.

- Right before the dust problem with the PC, one of the external hard drives started to grind and whirr, and that usually means that soon it’s going to stop working altogether. It was still under warranty, so under the rules I paid to send it back to Seagate and they sent a replacement, a rebuilt hard drive of the same size.

It started making the same grinding noises just a couple of weeks later, and I sent a polite email to complain to Seagate. Not long after that, someone from Seagate customer service phoned me to apologize and to arrange to make things right by sending a brand new, larger hard drive. Good job…

- On the other hand, I signed up for Major League Baseball’s free trial just before the All-Star game a couple of weeks ago, and just before that period ended I talked Pat into getting me the rest of the season’s games from MLB.com as my birthday present. It’s been a week and a half, and despite making phone calls, sending emails and proof of payment, and getting promises, promises from MLB customer service, I can log in, but still can’t watch a game online. Sheesh…

Will I buy from Seagate in the future? No doubt about it.
Will I use MLB.TV next season? At this time, I doubt it.

- I’ve never failed to subscribe to a newspaper, but these days it’s hard to remember why. The local newspaper is one of those that was just bought by Sam Zell, and now the cuts are coming. This week the paper unveiled a new layout, built on a foundation of smaller, shorter, and less.

- Comic strips used to be lots more important than they are now. The paper dropped these 12:

• Get Fuzzy
• Jump Start
• Frank and Ernest
• Wizard of Id
• B.C.
• Cathy
• Shoe
• Girls and Sports
• The Lockhorns
• Ziggy
• Speed Bump
• Herman

I’m sure they’ll not be missed. But by golly, the paper is still running Mark Trail…

- We’re voting for Jennifer on HGTV’s Design Star. Matt’s got skills, but not for a weeknight design show. He’d fit better on a Saturday morning DIYnet carpentry show.

- Finally, on a related subject, we got a call from the political polling folks at Quinnipiac University over the weekend, but we screened it and let the machine handle it instead. Hey, it’s an answering machine, isn’t it? Let it answer their questions, then.

Tomorrow it’s Mr. Kelly’s turn to be featured on Traditional Friday Cat Blogging. And I’ll talk to you later…

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