Tech Talk

On Tuesday I tried to power-up my favorite PC (a Dell Dimension 4550 that I bought late in the summer of 2024) and nothing happened when I hit the button.  I swapped power cords, and tried a different power outlet but no success.  The unit was comatose.  "Power supply," I thought.

I hauled the unit out from under the desk unplugged it again, disconnected a couple of audio lines, a mouse, a keyboard, three USB cables, the video interface, the network cable and god knows what else and I put it on the dining room table where I’ve been known to do my best work.  Looking at it face to face I thought it might be laughing at me.  "Wipe away that idiot smile," I said.  The unit was about as obedient as the dog.  I thought perhaps a tongue would come lolling out and panting would ensue. 

I wasn’t ready to trust my intuition so I powered-up the laptop, logged onto the
Dell site and opened the documentation that would confirm my
diagnosis.  The first challenge that the tyro PC repairman faces is finding his way into the box.  The documentation omits this critical step.  (Hint to Dell:  use hyperlinks better.)  After a walk around the dining room table for a 360 degree inspection, some chin rubbing, audible hemming and hawing, I figured out how to open the box.  It’s actually nicely engineered for service access.  It opens like a clamshell.  I popped out the 512MB memory chip, the video card, removed the power plugs from the floppy drive, the undersized 30GB hard drive, the DVD drive, removed the ribbon cables from the drives and from the motherboard, plugged the denuded thing back in the wall, saw a dim green FLEA light on the motherboard, but nothing else.  When I was on about step eleventy-seven ("Visually scan IDE controller for Cheetos") I decided to hell with it and removed the power supply.

Next came ten minutes of market research on new power supplies that led me to believe I wouldn’t be getting ripped off too badly if I paid some dude on eBay the "Buy it now" price of $26 plus $14 dollars for shipping.  Which I did. 

Last night, the new power supply was on the doorstep when I got home.  I had it out of the box and installed lickety split.  Powered-up, got the diagnostic beepery that says "fine, your power works, but nothing else is installed,"  and then I faced the demons of consumerism head-on.  Where you have 512MB of memory, shouldn’t you double it to 1GB?  Where you have a pitiful 30GB hard drive with only a few gigs free, shouldn’t you augment that with more disk space?  I’m an affirmative kind of guy so I answered "Yes!" to these inner voices.  Besides - excellent rationalization here - I had the unit open on the dining room table and why not upgrade it before shoving it back out of sight beneath the desk?  And with that I was off to Best Buy. 

Beth won’t go near the place, claims electron poisoning will kill her, so I dropped her at the Barnes and Noble where she made her monthly new releases library list.  "Voracious reader" is cliched from erroneous over-use, but Beth actually is one.  She gobbles a book or two every day and is grateful to our county library system for having all the new stuff that Barnes and Noble stocks.

Picked up some tax software, a new Microsoft optical scroll mouse, a can of compressed air, a 120 GB Western hard drive, and a Kingston 512MB memory card that matched the DDR 333 card that was already there.   Then home again, home again jiggety-jog, where I had a good time using the compressed air to blow all the dust bunnies out of the box, attached cables, powered up and partitioned my new drive so I could keep a live back-up of the C: drive on the 30 GB partition and move all my media files - graphics, video, audio, and textual - to the 90 GB partition.

I still have to install the mouse.

…and do the taxes.