There comes a time in most everyone's life when they must acquire a new PC. For some, its a matter of staying on the bleeding edge of technology. For others, its an environmental requirement- being forced by job or school to move from Windows to Mac, or vice-versa. For many others, its a tech refresh, where they have an older system, and feel a need to move from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8 or something like that. For a hearty few that are tired of the expense and rat-race nature of updates and upgrades, something like Linux may be in their immediate future. Lastly, there are those who have found themselves in the midst of a catastrophic hardware failure.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've experienced catastrophic hardware failure once or twice. Have you ever heard the phrase, " Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? (I had to look this up- it was Kelly Clarkson, not Pink, who did a song with this theme). Speaking for myself, much of what I've learned about the care and feeding of PCs has occurred in real time- that is, something failed, and the only tech support I had was me.
So flash forward a "few" years. It's a screwy week- the U.S.A.'s national holiday, Independence Day- the Fourth of July- falls on a Thursday this year. Jennifer and I had originally thought this week would be really short on work hours, but it turns out I would end up with a bunch of overtime- and a couple of days off! Of course, what happened did not exactly turn out this way.
On the Fourth, my sleep was disturbed by voices. I couldn't figure out what was going on, but after a little bit I dragged myself out of bed to find that Daniel's laptop had crashed most egregiously. After a great deal of discussion, Daniel announced that he wanted to purchase a new desktop. (Like the rest of his immediate family, his PC is his connection to the world.) So, we ended up making a pilgrimage to Tiger Direct in Hoffman Estates. Mind you, this is day One of my supposed two days off.
So off we go to the store. As he has not purchased a PC in some time, he's fairly clueless when we walk into the store. The sales folks at Tiger worked really hard to deliver a very nice PC within his budget, and after a while he got a PC configured, paid his money, and we left. Note that I said configured; this was a custom build, so we needed to return the following day to pick the machine up. When we got home, I cut the grass- mainly because it needed to be cut, but partly for a bit of stress relief.
The following day- Friday (Day Two of my supposed two days off) - Daniel worked, so we needed to wait until he was finished to pick up the PC. Thankfully, this was a holiday for many folks, so the rush hour traffic wasn't as bad as it normally would have been. We picked up the PC and came home. Life was good.
Until we discovered a slight problem. The new monitor had DVI and VGA inputs, but the video card had only HDMI outputs. We have no DVI or HDMI cables. Soooo......, a quick search on the web shows cables ranging from seven dollars to over thirty. We decided to see if we could find one at a local retail story. No luck at Office Depot. Ditto Target. We scored one at- of all places- Kmart. Cable= two hours.
Go figger. Data is way less painful than this.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you dont have to.
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