One of the most common sayings in my house is "I hate computers." This mostly comes from my dad since he's had nearly thirty years working with them, although nowadays more of his issues are due to the incompetence of the college he works for. I'm not sure of his latest problems, but mine is this little (little my ass!) laptop I got for high school graduation.
It all started with a BSOD on bootup saying it found an error and I'd have to restart. These usually aren't bad since reboots can fix a lot of problems, but this one wouldn't let me start the system at all and eventually led to the HD not even spinning up while the caps lock blinked a few times before the system shut down. I used another computer to look at Dell's complaints and found the issue was with my RAM. I cleaned it, and it worked for a few days. Then I figured I had to switch the RAM sticks. Again, worked for a few days. Then I had to buy new RAM. That managed to work for a couple weeks. Then I had to physically remove one of the sticks its socket was bad, leaving me with only 1 gig of RAM. Suffice to say, I find it annoying when the system entirely shuts down instead of working with what's available and just telling me "Can't access RAM in slot 1. The slot or the RAM might be bad. Have a nice day."
So much for small rants eh?
Next computer problem comes up, and this time it's far more frustrating. I boot up one time and notice odd pixels like what happens when a video game glitches out. I give the computer a light bump and it goes back to normal. This issue quickly devolved into the screen freezing and then all sorts of crap going on. Random blotches of color here, interlace effects there, entire portion of whiteness up here, and such crap. The only time it managed to BSOD it said the video card or its driver had an error that allowed it to run in an infinite loop. Smacking the computer a few times would usually get it back to normal, but it's a pain when it glitches out during a game or while writing a post for example. I reinstalled the OS and the driver, but that didn't work. I cleaned the video card, but the first couple times didn't work. This last time finally did, but I still have artifacts on the screen sometimes. Ebay, thank you for still having spare parts for this thing.
