On Wednesday, while waiting at IAH between flights, I spoke with a representative from GeekAvailable.com about repair of my note-book computer. The rep said that turn-around time would typically be about 72 hours, allowing for order and receipt of parts.

I took my computer to them on Thursday morning. On Saturday after-noon, a technician (the same fellow with whom I had spoken on Wednesday) told me that he believed that a voltage inverter had failed, and that he had ordered a replacement on Thursday or on Friday. (My computer has a large screen with an odd aspect ratio — 1920×1200 — so it's no surprise that this part would require a special order.)

(It's not good policy for them to order such a part without my clearance to actually effect the repair, but in this case I would have given my okay.)

I'm hoping, then, to have my note-book computer back to-morrow or on Tuesday.

---

While I await the return of that computer, I am using Bessie, a desktop computer that I maintain as a Win9x legacy machine.

As such, Bessie has only 512MB of RAM — Win9x actually becomes more dysfunctional if there is more RAM than that installed, though Win9x can handle GBs of virtual memory. But, with that memory constraint and with Windows' otherwise poor memory management, applications frequently hang or crash or otherwise do intensely annoying things. I really need to clean-up Bessie's file system and free-up a drive so that I can alternately boot Linux on it.

And Bessie connects to the 'Net at noticeably lower speed, probably because of crummy telephone wiring to the computer room.

So I am not doing nearly as much on-line as I otherwise would.

(The Woman of Interest has been kind enough to manage my principal character in the Kingdom of Loathing since my return to San Diego.)

Tags: computers, Geek Available, GeekAvailable, Laptop Repair San Diego, Rodrigo Pereira

This entry was posted and is filed under information technology, personal, public. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.