Dell Precision 650, October 2003 – January 2008

Miss Kitty After a great week in Mountain View with the rest of team I returned to find that not all was well.

When I tried to boot my trusty Dell Precision, nothing happened. Upon inspection, I found the video card had been pushed in and “bent”. I have been assured that no unauthorized vacuuming occurred during my absence, which leaves Miss Kitty as the likely suspect. I tried to re-seat the card to no avail. I think Miss Kitty actually did me a favor since I found a number of capacitors on the motherboard are bulging with “crap” coming out of their tops. I guess I am reaping what I sowed in my last post.

On Monday, I’ll try to find someone who might be able to replace the motherboard and possibly video card for a reasonable price but it looks like I’ll be needing a replacement for my personal computing soon.

PS. If you wish to comment, don’t forget to answer the challenge-response question!


Are Macs a ripoff ?

I sit here typing this on a 4+ year old Dell Precision while my trusty 3+ year old IBM Thinkpad stands by waiting for me to hit the road. The Dell has never needed a repair while the Thinkpad has been to the shop once. I like the Thinkpad so much, I even went for the extended warranty when the original 3 year warranty expired.

I’ve been jealous of the really sweet MacBook Pros that I’ve seen other mozillian’s packing and was planning on upgrading both my workstation and laptop to some really killer Macs sometime in the first half of next year. However, I am having second thoughts after seeing the kind of experience others are having.

Norm Walsh has been having problems recently that raised my concerns a bit.
Dave Winer has also been experiencing his share of the pain, but his experience with the Apple Store has left me flabbergasted.

What other choices for a really fast workstation and laptop do I have? For what its worth, I’m running Fedora on both my workstation and laptop and don’t want Windows on either machine. Suggestions very much appreciated.

Compromised.

My shell account at Dreamhost was compromised and this site was vandalized. It appears this was a wide spread event and a number of other sites hosted at Dreamhost were affected. If you have an account at Dreamhost, I recommend you change your passwords for your shell and email and check your web content for modifications.

I’ve cleaned up the mess (I think). Although as far as I can tell the Spider.xpi was not modified, I have generated a new version of Spider 0.0.2.7 to force an update to any Spider users.