New computer for my parents
I just purchased/built a new computer for my parents. The old Compaq was becoming more of a headache to maintain: it’s an old Win98 box that feels sluggish even for its specs. We recently reinstalled the OS from the Compaq recovery disks because of five years of bit rot; it’s still slow and prone to crashing. My realization at that time was that it’s not worth the effort to maintain this five-year-old computer. It’s worth the couple hundred dollars to buy a new one to replace it.
So, I ordered a Lindows computer made by Wintergreen Systems last week. It’s a pity the Linux install has to be removed because of the apps that my parents run (in particular, AOL dial-up for the time being, and MS Works). Linux would have made backup easier, since I would have taken the old Compaq harddrive as a secondary disk and done the occassional rsync on it, or, perhaps a straight mirror, depending on how the larger disk in the new computer gets sliced up.
This is actually the first more or less complete system I’ve ordered for personal use since i486 days, with my first Gateway. I’ve built all the subsequent boxes. Usually, building the boxes involves parts that don’t quite fit together: the jutting front USB connectors on the current computer is a prime example of this. I figured I should get a pre-built system for my parents because, while I can deal with hardware oddities on my own machine, I won’t be able to deal with it quite as well if the computer is in Bayside. This was the least expensive complete system I could find, outside of perhaps a Wal-Mart Lindows computer.
The box arrived earlier in the week, and I powered it up for the first time Friday evening. It starts up the moment I plug in the power cable — fans spin up, the disk drive makes noise — and suddenly the machine shuts down. There are no POST noises. I fiddle with the power button on the front. Every third or fourth press gets it to power up with the same, sudden shutdown. So I call Wintergreen, and they tell me that there’s been a number of similar complaints. Apparently a manufacturing problem with the power button. We test this by unplugging the power button from the motherboard and shorting out the pins on the front panel head. The machine boots up. The problem is the 5 cent button: it must be shorted out internally. I could return the computer, or I could try to fix or replace the power button myself.
So, on Saturday, I drag out this old case I had. I bought it to put the parts for my old computer inside, to get rid of the gigantic noisy tower case. The old computer had stopped working, though, so the case was never used. But I’m sure the power switch on it worked. It was, of course, a different design from the one on the Wintergreen case. What to do?
I wound up more or less building a computer from components on Saturday, taking out all the bits and pieces from the Wintergreen and putting them into the other case. It took about an hour, less time that building a machine from even more basic components because there was no need to fiddle with the CPU/fan/heatsink stack and all the irritation that involves. I did need to splice in the power LED wires from one case to the other: for some reason, the spare case had a 3-pin LED plug, but the motherboard had a 2-pin head; scissors and tape took care of this. But the whole building process was what I wanted to avoid earlier. I was just foiled by a 5-cent component.
Oh, while looking through the components for the Wintergreen system, I noticed that the hard drive was from ValueDisk. I find this a little frightening; in my closed universe of hard drive manufacturers, there’s the usual big names: Seagate, WD, IBM, etc. There’s some exotica: Fujitsu/IBM. But Value Disk is something I’ve never heard of before, and the name evokes an image of Chinese laborers pulling disk platters from the scrapheap of rejects at the Western Digital factory, putting them together and slapping on the Value Disk label. The Value Disk website doesn’t have an MTBF figure for the drives, though there’s a handy “warranty” link.