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About a year ago I bought an Acer L100 core 2 duo box to function as a simple Linux desktop computer. It’s been working fine, until one morning it would not turn on anymore. When I contacted the supplier where I bought it, i was told that since it was a few days out of warranty, Acer would not repair it under warranty. Granted, I probably could not have sent it under warranty repair anyways, because I can not send one of my desktop computers in without removing the harddisk. I can not risk anyone getting a hold of any type of data related to my company.  Sending it in for out-of-warranty repairs would probably cost way too much for a box that only costs a few hundreds dollars in the first place.

So the only logical step at this point is to just try and figure out what’s broken. I asked a colleague to help me out, since Im not a hardware guru, and together we opened up the box. We immediately noticed what was wrong. One of the capacitors had expanded and opened up, oozing out electrolyte. Several years ago this was a real plague, as lots of vendors had used a faulty electrolyte formula. I’ve had lots of computers, but never had one ooze out electrolyte on a capacitor. This just doesn’t happen much anymore, as vendors should be using proper capacitors. So why is my Acer, which has never really had to work hard as i merely use it to run X with a few Xterms, blowing out capacitors. Is Acer skimping on materials? No wonder they’re so cheap.

We bought a 60 cent capacitor, replaced the broken one, and my Acer is working again. So instead of spending lots of money to have a factory fault fixed by Acer, i spent 60 cents (and a home made apple pie for my colleague).  I don’t think I’ll be buying Acer anymore.

Im really getting tired of all these computer related problems. There was a time in my life where I got a kick out of looking at insides of computers, but after a few thousand of those, I now just want things to work, and work well. I have a low tolerance for crappy hardware or software.

First, I got a new machine. It’s so new, fast and shiny, it needs Vista to run. Which it did ok for the first few hours, until i realised it didnt let me add my external 2TB sata disk, which contain all my images. I spent literally days on this crap, but in the end I gave up. I switched out my 2TB raid with Julie’s 1TB raid, and now it’s happy. And ofcourse XP has no problem with the 2TB one.  If that weren’t enough, I added 2  internal sata disks as well, which worked fine for about a day, until after one reboot they just went *POOF*, gone. They were visible in the bios, but Vista hated them or something. Maybe they were made by a competitor it didnt like. I spent a few hours on it, but I ended up reverting to a previous state of my machine which fixed the problem. How can you lose harddisks?!? That is like last century technology and Vista still doesnt get it right.

Then, Lightroom brought out version 1.3 of their awesome software. Unfortunately, instead of improving things, it made everything super slow for me. I dont really like posting in the Adobe Lightroom forums because some of the regulars there should really be kept away from other people, but I had to bite the bullet and posted my findings. A feature Adobe expanded (Camera Raw Caching) was obviously causing major slowdown on my Vista machine, and I posted pages of proof. I think they started to believe me after I posted some video of the problem, and how to make it go away (make the cache read-only). Lots of other people seem to be having slowdown problems, so I hope LR gets fixed soon.  It’s by far the best piece of software that I have used in the last few years, and I would still recommend it to anyone.

Why can’t I just have a few weeks without problems.

Yesterday a very helpful Dell employee came to my house to replace my XPS700 motherboard with an XPS720. This was a free upgrade that Dell started to provide XPS700 owners with a better upgrade path for additional hardware. I also ordered a Quad Core CPU with it, which came with a 25% discount. Pretty cool deal.

After about an hour, the guy leaves, and it looks like I have a working system again. That is, until after another hour or so I notice a new hard disk I didnt have before. I immediately knew what happened. He had rebooted the machine without configuring the raid controller on the new board. My boot disk is actually a raid1/mirror and you need to tell the new raid controller that. Instead, it booted with 2 separate identical drives. Ofcourse, after the initial boot these 2 drives can no longer be seen as identical and I was unable to recreate the raid1 volume.

So you think.. no problem. I take the C drive and make that the first drive in a new raid1 volume. That worked. Now I had a degraded raid 1 volume which was missing its second drive. Good, i have the second drive, so now I can add the second drive and tell the raid controller to rebuild the raid volume. Right? Wrong! More »