I hate hardware.
I truly, intensely, hate hardware. Hardware breaks, is expensive and doesn't cooperate. The two Dell Inspiron laptops we bought February last year have had the following wrong with them within the warranty period:
- Two broken power bricks.
- Broken keyboard
- Two broken hard disks
- Processor and fan replacement
- Little rubber feet that melt off because they are placed directly under the cpu
- A design blunder that makes the fan suck up dust and coat the processor with it, making it necessary to blow the fan aperture through regularly.
And then, Sunday night, two bloody weeks out of warranty, the hard disk of my laptop breaks again. Nothing doing with Dell, no replacements, so I had to buy a new one. Paradigit (an excellent shop, at least in Deventer, where we buy our supplies and parts regularly) had a replacement drive of the right type, so Irina went and bought one, and I spent the night building it in. I'm no hero with those fiddly little screws that are always tightened way too hard in the factory, but I finally succeeded.
Only to discover while moving my music collection from the server that's bringing you this blog page that calcifer's hard drive is failing too. I hate hardware.