Infernal Machines
emonic possession of machinery isn’t just my imagination, is
it? I can point the remote over my shoulder at the stereo and push the button
repeatedly. But it isn’t until I turn and look at the thing that it suddenly
decides to obey.
I’ve built a lot of computers and integrated networks as an
ancillary part of my businesses. We have a few home-built machines floating
around our house and they work great. For some reason though, I thought it
necessary to buy a real computer on which to do my writing. So a
high-end name brand PC was purchased and the work began. Problem was, it
developed a severe case of narcolepsy. You’d be typing along and ‘blip,’ off it
would go, completely dead. This regular occurrence became a real
nuisance. Several calls to the company’s technical support center garnered
several hypotheses, but no solutions.
After taking matters into my own hands and pulling the case
apart, I discovered that my brand-new powerhouse Pentium-4 supercomputer only
had one fan in the entire case with a cute little duct pointing toward the CPU.
This, and years of rocket science, led me to surmise that the problem might be
heat related. Why a huge computer manufacturer like the one that built this
moderately pricey machine would allow this cooling design to pass through QA,
still boggles me. The duct was pulled and tossed and a CPU fan was added along
with an additional case fan. It was noisier with the extra fans, but seemed to
work okay, until the room got cold.
Push the button to fire it up and all the fans come on…and
nothing else. No screen, no bios, nothing. Turn it off and back on a few times
and finally it would start. Like some of my cars from high school. The
occasional sharp rap on the side of the case would sometimes help too. I know
it helped me. Most of the book was written on this machine until I needed to
use the Draw function of Word. ‘Error’ was part of the message that greeted me whenever
I tried to open Draw. Granted, that wasn’t a hardware problem. But at that
point, did it matter?
Everything was moved to one of my lowly home-built machines
running a Celeron processor. Not only did it handle the huge manuscript well,
but also my Corel graphics suite upgrade, Acrobat and a host of other complex
software programs. But then it developed WRRS (Windows Random Reboot Syndrome).
Without warning, and without regard to whatever you’re currently doing at the
time, the screen will go black and the machine will restart itself. Nice. It
isn’t a hardware issue, but a device driver conflict of some sort. It’s kind of
like having a room packed full of Republicans, Democrats, Liberals and
Conservatives Usually they get along fine. But occasionally a couple of
opposing viewpoints ruin it for everybody. Fortunately, it’s fairly infrequent.
Just remember, threatening your name brand machine with a
stroll under the tires of a large truck won’t make it behave. Just replace it
with something you built from scratch that works better and cost a third as
much. Oh, the shame of it.
- Ranse
Parker
Circle
of Doors
