Alex Pooley’s Blog

I spent this weekend in geek hell and it was aweful! On Friday my Dell 24″ LCD _finally_ arrived. I plugged it in to my laptop and as I suspected, it was not powerful enough for the monitor. I ran off to the local computer store and bought a PC, but it wasn’t going to be ready until Saturday. On Saturday I picked up my PC and turned it on. Everything was OK for 5 minutes but after rebooting the monitor would stay black. After a while I sussed out the video card was overheating. By this time it was too late to take the PC back. I spent Sunday trying to install _anything_ on the box but nothing was working right. I tried Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, FreeBSD, Windows XP. To make maters worse, I had just exceeded my download quota so my download speed was capped. Sigh. I think there may be an overheating issue still, and perhaps RAM problems. Anyway, today is Monday and the machine is back at the shop and I’m stuck with my 15″ laptop. My 24″ LCD is currently serving as a very stylish paper weight.

As an aside, Gentoo seemed pretty nice. Almost like a linux’ed FreeBSD.

*Update:* I’ve finally picked up my PC from the shop and apparantly it was a single stick of faulty RAM. They couldn’t reproduce the problems I was seeing. Whatever the case, I hope this thing just works now. Geez, talk about ruining the joy of purchasing a new PC and 24″ LCD!