It’s raining 64-bit Vista, Leopards, and Gators

December 30, 2008 · Posted in Technical · 1 Comment

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What’s a gal to do? After a long conversation with the husband yesterday, we decided to ditch the idea of a netbook and shell out the extra money for a new desktop. I had been researching desktops for awhile, and we took the plunge (We got a solid deal, which I’m sure I’ll talk about in another post).

Why so soon? A big part of it has to do with my husband’s scanning project that he has been working on. His grandfather was a photographer, and he is creating a digital archive of all of his work. Not to sound morbid, but there are only a couple of relatives left who can help us document some of the images, and they really look forward to our trips home so that they can see the work my husband has done. This is something that we can’t put a price tag on, and the laptop (MacBook) was giving us a bunch of compatibility issues when we would name and transfer files from one operating system to the other. He has actually stopped working on the project for awhile, and has been anxious to start back up.

Second, I got a call yesterday from a friend who I have been wanting to collaborate with for awhile now. It’s been one of those things where we get together and toss ideas around, but due to conflicting schedules, nothing has really materialized. His schedule has freed up, and this is the kind of motivation I need to get back into programming. He works on Macs exclusively, and I will need to upgrade to Leopard in order to work with him effectively. Having another computer in the house will make the Leopard upgrade a little less nerve-wrecking. In addition, with VMWare Fusion (which allows other operating systems to run on a Mac) taking up a whopping 40GB of my 60GB hard drive, it was time to put it on an “application diet” and reinstall it. Having a new Windows machine makes this about 1000 times easier.

But now, I’m dealing with the nasty repurcussions. Vista 64 has no interest in running my XP applications. That’s a lot of fun. Then, VMWare Fusion vomited today, (ironically, it was immediately after I tweeted someone about how great Fusion was) and I lost my OS. Recovery was pretty lame, and reinstallation of the .NET framework to run the one program I need for tutoring was a complete failure. Awesome.

Not to mention, we have guests coming for New Years, and I need to set up all my sites with HostGator within the next couple of days.

Any suggestions to deal with the technological chaos? I’d love to hear them!

Tags: <computers, Leopard, Vista>

Ding Dong, the Dell is dead

August 23, 2008 · Posted in Frugal Spending, Technical · 7 Comments

It’s almost official.

We decided not to extend our warranty on our Dell Inspiron 9100 (from 4 years to 5 years) because of the cost. It would have been about $350, and we had just gotten a new hard drive, DVD drive, and motherboard while it was still under the 4-year warranty. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe the CPU could die?

That’s a possibility. At least, that’s what the error code said yesterday. I reseated the CPU in a lame attempt that it might have been knocked loose. This process took a little over an hour and countless numbers of tiny screws, but I still got the same error message after putting it all back together (hey, at least I didn’t break anything in the process).

So here’s the question: Should I purchase a refurbished CPU for about $120 and hope that this is what is wrong? It could also be memory, but I reseated both individually to no avail, and I doubt that both of them went bad at the same time. It could also be the motherboard, which isn’t even worth replacing (in terms of cost). From what I can find online, if purchasing a CPU doesn’t work, I would have to pay the shipping to send it back as well as a 20-25% restocking fee.

We could also start looking for another computer. This behemoth of a laptop is almost 5 years old, and my husband hates it (he’s the one that is the primary user). Ideally, I would like to find a new computer, and then try to repair the Dell and sell it online.

I want to be frugal, but at the same time I don’t want to pay money to temporarily revive a dying horse. What would you do?