Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Page 2 of 3

aha

dell called me this morning. the person didn’t seem keen on talking about the refund, and instead talked abt the issues i’m having with the monitor. well, i told her the truth saying that the backlight issue seems to have diminished a bit and she was eager to close the ticket but i didn’t agree to it. i also mentioned the humming problem which surfaces if i have the monitor up and running then entire day, and they had a techie call abt it. the problem did surface a few times, but i didn’t bother monitoring it cuz i thought i’d be sending it back. hopefully i can get it recorded somehow.

need to get second opinions on the backlight and i’ve been looking for my camera charger all over but to no avail. can’t use my sister’s cam either. :( well, we’ll see how it goes.

now, where was i?

been a while hasn’t it? just haven’t found the time to plonk myself in front of my website and start writing. in fact, i have to leave for dinner with my dad in about 15 mins, so i’ll have to make this a quickie.

so… where did i left off… ah yes, the weekend before last. thursday night it was. ate old lemang i did. suffered for 7 days i have. couldn’t sleep through a bad tummy ache, which lasted throughout the week and throughout certain important events. fortunately, my mom provided her special natural remedy of a high fibre fruit diet, and it didn’t get any worse.

let’s just skip the weekend. :P

i’ve been trying to spend as much time as i can with this 24″ monitor, as i’ve already scheduled for a refund. no matter how nice it is, dell tech support is not willing to go the extra mile for me in my quest for a perfect display (this current one has very bad backlight bleeding) and attributes all my complaints to be within ‘industrial standards’. evidence that our country is trailing behind in both manufacturing quality and customer service. i should’ve heeded those mental alarms when i first saw ‘Made in China’ on the box.

at the same time, with some of my funds released, i can now start on my case-modding project. having borrowed fish’s dad’s work table, i’m now in the midst of acquiring the tools and safety equipment necessary. i’ve even taken out my sistem out of the casing and it’s running on a plastic box next to the computer table. pictures later. :P it’s running off a 2nd hand Abit IS7 motherboard which seems to be performing well so far, but evidently it’s the dust on my CPU heatsink that’s been degrading performance. need to get some cans of compressed air for that.

as for things going on at work, i stayed back friday night and sunday afternoon trying to fix some problems other people caused to no avail. well, at least i can try to claim for off-in-lieu again. better do it now before management decides to introduce more dubious policies.

i’m now first sergeant in BF2, and level 31 in WoW. :) it also looks like i won’t be returning my old hard drive after all, since there seems to have been some funny symptoms with my new one. tested my PSU using a digital multimeter i bought for my botched soldering project, and the numbers seem ok. hopefully it was just the motherboard. still waiting for my new cpu cooler before returning my bad RAM.

till next time.

RMA season

to crucial, a set of sticks that don’t carry forward the 1′s,

to dell, an old revision of a monitor that’s supposed to be better,

to maxtor/seagate, a drive that can’t find it’s things in time.

will be passing my ram back to dinster when i meet him to pick up a new cpu cooler.

will be calling dell tomorrow to tell them how disappointed i am about the bleeding backlight and the irritating humming.

will be looking for the cycom receipt. :P

misplaced faith

found out before dinner that it’s my ram that has been causing so much problems with system stability. not surprising, but i was hoping that it wouldn’t turn out as expected. what was supposed to make my overclocked system stable turns out to be the culprit. harapkan pagar, pagar makan padi is the malay phrase that comes to mind.

let’s step back a few years to see why i have blindly placed my trust in Crucial, even with all the recent bad rep. Crucial used to be Micron, a company which churned out pretty decent SDRAM back in the Pentium III days. I always ordered Micron CAS2 RAM, even if they’re a tad expensive than usual, and have never had problems with them ever.

now, it’s just a name i want to forget.

before we start another “you shouldn’t have overclocked” discussion, bear in mind that the RAM i bought is manufactured specifically to keep up with my current overclocked CPU speed. my front side bus was upped from 200 to 250 MHz, and PC-4000 DDR SDRAM should be able to follow that without any stress at all!

luckily i still have my old ram to use when the time comes for me to RMA both sticks. i don’t want anything to do with Crucial any more, so there’s no point keeping one good stick and sending back another. nowadays, there are just so many alternatives, providing the same level of warranty (lifetime). and they’re much cheaper too.

now, hopefully my supplier is as helpful as he says he is.

lunch break

sigh.. all it takes is one phone call to ruin a noon nap.

merv and az were trying to get me out of office to play mahjong. but i shouldn’t give in to temptation each time. besides, it’s a little wasteful to take half day off now considering i have only another 2 1/4 hours to spend at the office.

my WoW exploits at the office have finally paid off. while something is causing the game to crap out on my desktop, it runs quite ok on the notebook. the graphics may be sub standard, but it seems workable. it’ll be useful for those late nights waiting for ayin to finish her work. she’s going to start her practical training soon, and i can only guess that she’ll be required to work long hours.

anyways, i got my sis to start on WoW. even her bf is contemplating on getting himself a copy, altho he’s still uncertain whether the monthly fee is worth it. even i am having doubts, as we’ve been having a LOT of problems with the server lately. constant lags, and quite a few crashes since the new 1.9 patch are causing much frustration among users of our Khaz’goroth realm.

my bro has also started playing, altho BF2 is still his primary thing. i guess it’s better that way, since i don’t want him to get addicted to more things. in fact, as soon as we see trouble with his school work, he’ll never touch the PC again.

besides WoW, i didn’t do much over the weekend ‘cept for cleaning up the house a bit, as well as helping Fish move to his brother’s house at Damansara Kim. his house will be renovated soon, so he’ll only be there temporarily with the rest of his family. being only a helper, i did not fully experience the stress in its entirety, but it seemed that i’d be able to cope with my own moving sooner or later. when my family first moved into our current home, i only cared about transporting my computer. :P being young sure had its privileges. saying that, i don’t think i’ll be sparing any of my siblings the work. :P

i liked his temp home, being new and somewhat modern even though it’s located in a cramped area in PJ. i thought the renovation was done rather well, and it’s really making me itch for my own landed home. there’s still some affordable double storey link houses in the vicinity that are still ‘quite’ affordable (if we pooled all our money together). at the same time, my sibs tell me that my dad wants to transfer over his share of the apartment to me. a very lucrative offer, but i’m afraid the high service charges alone will kill me (i.e. force me to quit WoW among other things). well, we’ll see if that upcoming promotion comes through and make a decision then.

sigh, any mention of promotion these days makes me feel disillusioned.