Friday, April 20, 2007

My HP pavilion ze4315 is dying

That's the same one that killed one hard drive already... this just sucks. I was expecting for the thing to serve more than 4 years. The symptoms I have, think I tracked it down to that small board that sits below power button and row of "One-touch" buttons. It's really a flimsy piece of equipment, and either there's a crack in the board, or the bunch of wires does not connect reliably. So the effects are: sudden OS crashes and notebook shuts down sometimes, random errors at startup, Windows blue screen. Sometimes, when I try to power notebook up, it would just go through an infinite cycle of trying to power up, powering down, powering up again. Light (or not so light) knocking on the panel behind which the said buttons an speakers are sometimes restores it to normal operation.

I'm very upset, but the pain sets in and I'm getting prepared to buy a replacement. Not sure at all the replacement will be notebook, desktops are so much more reliable. If I will really need a notebook to work while traveling, I'll simply get one at work. Bummer.

Update: got a fresh idea. Some folks have reported using thin clients in home environment with great success, and this setup is greatly appealing to me. I certainly dislike maintaining (Windows patches, software updates, backups, oh my!) several PCs at home. Before I did not mind, but now it's not really fun but a chore. I've parted with the delusion that next series of patches or software updates is going to make any of computers in my house any better. There are Sun Rays on eBay, but those are old version. I think I could wait until Sun Ray 2's appear for sale not directly from Sun, but from second-hand retailers. I will need to figure out how software needs to be set up, but this could be interesting and rewarding experience.