My Last Dell Ever
So wow... I came home tonight, turned on my computer, checked the email, Ana came home and I decided that I was a bit tired, so I went to take a nap. When I woke up, my computer was off and I asked Ana if she had shut it off, or maybe it shutdown by itself and she says "no, I put it on standby for you."
Huh? Standby? Ana has never put the computer on standby in the three years we've been together. Why now? (Answer: New job = new computer that actually works. Thus she thought that the hunk of junk I use daily would work too. Wrong answer.)
With a feeling of dread, I tried to power it up. NO deal. I sorta knew it was not going to work. I think I asked Ana for exactly this reason, because I had already tried it once or twice and it wouldn't start. Soooo... now what? It's a Dell Latitute CPh and it's been acting badly lately. It won't charge the battery - so if you unplug it, it'll die instantly - and I've been seeing screen "flashes" where the whole screen turns black for just a second. This is my second Dell to start going down the hole. I'm not sure yet what the deal is with the CPh, but my old computer, a CPx, has a problem in the connection between the screen and the motherboard. There's some sort of short so it acts flaky as hell and is more or less unusable and sits in the closet.
Okay, so I took the CPh apart and put it back together in case there was some problem with like that. Nope - no good. So after a series of attempts too get it started again (this means repeatedly pressing the on key while doing keyboard acrobatics to see if something worked), I finally gave up and pulled the flaky CPx out of the closet and booted that up. Sure enough it gave me massive memory problems and dropped me down to 128 megs of RAM. Joy. Also, the keyboard on this one is dying too - with the control and shift keys sporadically stopping to work (though at least it has an American keyboard again! woohoo). In general it's a train wreck and I should call Dell and have them fix it in the last 3 months of the warranty... I mean I paid $5,000 for it in 2000 with all the doo-dads and now it's sitting in my closet. These are my last Dells, ever.
Okay... so that's where I am. I got the flaky CPx to boot up in 128 megs of RAM and at least I'm online. If I can't find a solution to the standby problem the other computer is just a heap of plastic and some silicon. This is not good. Oof. I also can use my new Latitude from work to do stuff, but I'd rather not. I don't want the temptation of doing development for myself at work and that would be there if I loaded up all the Mobile SDKs I'm playing with now.
That's what sorta annoys me - I'd love to scrap these two hunks of junk, go down and buy an iBook tomorrow. A funky new phone I have to justify to myself and Ana, but a computer to do development and writing, I don't. I NEED a PC. However, all the Nokia SDKs and Symbian stuff is all written for the PC. And the ADSL line I have now doesn't have a Mac driver for the USB modem either - PC onoly.
(I just noticed the o key is sticking also). Arrgh.
Okay. Any hints would be appreciated. I'm going to spend the rest of the evening Googling for answers.
-Russ
30 seconds later, Google has the answer. I'm an Ass. I took longer too write this post than fix the fucking computer.
Solution: take all the peripherals out AND only have 1 memory card in the machine. Reboot from AC. Poof, it works.
My LAST DELL EVER.