Taniith’s Relto

Ok, I guess I’ll throw readers a bone and explain one of the crappy/stressful things that have been happening. Well, I assume most readers will remember when I got my Alienware laptop…. and it had a defective fan from the very beginning. I waited a month to get it, had it a day, sent it back, waited another month, got it back, and have had it about two months now. Well, on Wednesday (Thursday?) morning it was shipped out to Alienware for a motherboard replacement. Now, one of the IT people at Beaver had remarked the first time that it sounded like a motherboard problem; she said the motherboard regulates the fan speed, and it was probably regulating it incorrectly.

Well, I……..

Crap. I just remembered that I already poasted about this a few days ago. Silly me. Um, I don’t know why I am bothering to poast this anyway, but why throw away a perfectly good (if repetitive) poast? I guess I can add to it by saying that I fought with them on the phone for 30-45 mins, and was informed that they “do not have a compensation policy.” AKA, no way are they making a new one for me or giving me anything but 2-day shipping and an extension on my warranty for this one. The woman tried to warn me that I would be wasting my time with the supervisor, but I wouldn’t listen

*shrug*

Oh, and Danielle: If Dan’s looking at a new computer, and is thinking Alienware, just tell him to keep in mind that I have heard that the workstations are known to shake floors/be really loud even though they claim to be super quiet. I hear the desktops are fine, but I’m not sure you two want one of the workstations in the house. Its possible that I heard wrong though, just keep it in mind.

-Taniith

Hey all. Now, I know I haven’t been poasting recently, or at least not the sort of stuff I usually poast. Well, things have been a little hectic… one thing in particular, but I don’t want to get into that right now. I will, maybe in a day or two, but lets just say that Beaver is not the school it used to be.

Anyway, I had an interesting experience/idea yesterday. So my dad and I were coming home from lunch and listening to the all a-cappella show on 88.9. My dad made a comment about how no one in the family ended up doing much a-cappella after all the hype we made about it. I started thinking about how I might join a group at WPI, and then wondered to myself about the possibility of doing Les Mis songs a-cappella. Well, what should come on the radio but an a-cappella group called The Hyannis Sound singing Heaven On Their Minds from Jesus Christ Superstar! How’s that for timing?

Well, then I started thinking and … here’s where my idea showed up … I though about the following idea. Put up a musical, but rather than hire a “real” band, use an a-cappella group!

I think that would be very cool. Thoughts?

-Taniith

Linky
o_O

-Taniith

I’ll make this quick because I need to go to sleep. The short version is that I bought a Certified 2002 Honda Accord SE this afternoon. I should have it sometime next week once the title comes in from the RMV.

Yay.

-Taniith
PS. It is black….. of course ;P

Ok, you might want to read the poast that comes before this one to get what happened earlier. But I will add some more to that story, along with some good news (*cautious optimism*).

So the whole hard drive problem started last night when I set up my laptop after switching to my dad’s house. I use a raid 0 setup; essentially, I have 2 100 gb hard drives, but the computer sees them as a single 200 gb drive. This is done with some sorta bios thing that makes an “array” to trick windows…. or something. Anyway, I turn on the computer, and soon after I get a message that there is no array detected…. wonderful right? So I am freaking out trying to fix it but not wanting to do any of the “rebuild array” and “define/destroy array” commands in case I loose my data. Well, after turning it on and off several times (and disconnecting mouse/keyboard/new LCD wires), it decides to boot to Windows. YAY! So I forgot about it.

So this morning I turned it on, and it did the “no array detected” thing again…. but this time I couldn’t convince it to boot to Windows, so I had to call Alienware. She told me that, even though it doesn’t seem to be the drives but the “controller” (motherboard?) instead, my data is probably gone after what we ended up doing. Well, I was angry about that (understandably?), but after talking with my dad and going to dinner, I decided to try something. I had put back the hard drives to their factory setup (yes, I had to take apart the hard drive section of my laptop 3-4 times while on the phone…. they really like to tighten those screws!), so I gave it one more try. I turned it on, went to the bios to set it to raid instead of ATA (we were checking if just one drive was dead by trying them as separate drives, you know, the standard/old-fashioned way). Well guess what? It had already set itself back to after I put the drives back….. and it was listing the correct array again!

So now I am frantically copying my hard drive to my external drive (400gb for teh win!) in about 3 different ways (normal copy/paste, windows backup, and… telepathy?) Anyway, at least now I wont have to restore from month old partial backups….. and I think I might start doing this sort of thing more often. I just wish Norton Ghost didn’t get angry when you try to install it on machines with raid :(. Though, technically, the Alienware stuff is supposed to use Ghost, so maybe it would work if I bought it?

*shrug*

At least I get to keep my up-to-date data now regardless…. and it is accessible even without the compy being online/here.

-Taniith

I think my current away message sums this up pretty well:

Lets run down the checklist:

-Get up at 1 pm…. check
-Time is now 4 pm… check
-Haven’t eaten yet today…. check
-Been on the phone with tech support since waking up…. check
-Have to ship the laptop back AGAIN for a busted motherboard…. CHECK!

The woman was really nice and was trying to do whatever she could to keep me from having to send it back (any other part and they could just send a technician). Apparently the log of what we did is comparable to the bible (aka, VERY LONG and detailed), and she said that if I call Customer Service on Monday I should be able to get them to speed up at least the shipping, if not the repair itself. Personally, I plan to make hell with these people and reference my comment a few months ago. It was something to the tune of, “Well, I think you should just build me a new machine. I mean, if this fan is defective out of the box, who’s to say something worse wont be defective further down the line when it becomes a bigger issue?” Well look who was right?

Lets see how many managers it takes to either get a new machine built, or get an address to contact the president of the company!

-Taniith

Well, its been a while, and it fits in well with what I have to say, so I guess maybe I should say it again for all of the new people: I have a tracker on the site that shows me what poasts are looked at by which people. No, it doesn’t say who is who, but it says cities, and I am able to figure out a lot of people that I actually know by that information.

On that note, this goes out to one specific person (though it is good advice in general). When you agree not to do something (such as agreeing not to look at the archives for a certain month), not only one, but multiple times, it is wrong to go behind my back and do it anyway. Maybe I have the dates mixed up and this happened before I our conversation, but I don’t think it did.

I have to say, you might not want to reply to this poast (incase you intended to) to make sure other people don’t find out who I am talking about.

-Taniith