Posted by Jim at June 12th, 2004

On Thursday, I passed a kind of computer milestone. I (for the first time ever) brought one of my computers into an actual shop for someone else to diagnose the problem that I’m having.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I could probably figure out the problem myself. That’s one of the things I’m responsible for at work. On the other hand, diagnosing hardware problems is much easier when you’ve either got a lot of experience or you’ve got a lot of equipment, allowing you to swap parts in and out until you find the one makes things work.

I have two computers at home, but I didn’t really want to take apart my working computer to test problems on my non-working computer. Also, buying the parts as I went seemed likely to rack up at least as much money as bringing it into a store and having someone with extensive knowledge look at it.

Thus, both my wife and I are using the FreeBSD box for the weekend until the XP computer gets fixed. In the meantime, I’m dreading the possibilities. For example, I’m going to be really pissed if I have to pay for a motherboard replacement. Owing to the fact that the current motherboard uses sdram, I’ll probably have to buy new ram as well. Current motherboards don’t use sdram anymore. Having to buy a new cpu will also make me unhappy, but since the current cpu is fairly decent, it’ll at least be available.

Probably at a low price too.

I’m taking it as a given though, that it’ll eat up my on-the-side-consulting-money for the month. That’s irritating.

On the bright side, fixing the computer might count as a business expense. I’ll have to keep the reciept.