Several days ago, my PC decided to get stupid. I tried to turn it off right before heading out the door to catch the bus in the morning. It had decided to lock up and whole crap loads of stuff had to be forced to quit. Being in a hurry, I didn’t notice everything that was causing problems.
When I got home in the evening, the computer was reporting that a network cable was unplugged. Over the last several days I have tried all sorts of things short of a hard reset of the router, although I did turn it off a couple times. Seeing as the wireless connection was still good and the router was reporting the wired connection was good, and knowing when I moved the cable to another port or unplugged it I was in no mood to lose my entire connectivity.
This morning I pulled the case on the computer and cleaned it out and had a look around. Seeing as I had a power light on the NIC but an amber connection light when the cable was plugged in I decided maybe the NIC was bad. My friend, Jenn, who has been awesome at helping me troubleshoot during this whole escapade reminded me that NICs are pretty cheap. So after cleaning out the computer I put it back together and figured out how to disable the built-in NIC.
A quick trip to Best Buy for a $25 NIC (and two DVDs and a CD — yes, I’m depressed again) and I’m back online. I probably ought to run the router configuration and make sure every thing is locked down as good as it was, but for now everything is working and I do have ZoneAlarm installed.
This whole episode shouldn’t have been as hard as it was for me, but when something like this happens only every 3-4 years it is hard to remember everything one needs to do to troubleshoot a problem. Plus, I did not want to lose my wireless connection for the Mac.
I guess it’s about time to look into replacing the stupid PC. I don’t have the money but, so what? I don’t think there’s much, if anything, that I use that’s PC only anymore. I do use Outlook for my non-school email (that is, the email that comes from here and elsewhere), but I have no doubt that I can learn to use Mail, or Thunderbird or some other thing. Like Iris, I have a few things in Access, but not much. Well, actually I have a lot—data on about 700 CDs. But I haven’t been able to use the program that runs on top of Access for a couple years now, so I guess all that data is lost to me.
ZoneAlarm is PC only, but after what their online renewal thing did to me last time I swore I’d get rid of the PC before I had to renew again anyway. There’s one or two other things that aren’t that important as long as I can export the data in some form, and I believe I can.
I believe I’ll look into a Mac Mini or an iMac. The Mac Mini would be a lot less as I have the 19″ widescreen LCD monitor I bought several months back, and I have a wireless keyboard and mouse that could be used with it. If I was to go with a 17″ iMac the price goes up almost $300, although the processor speed bumps up a tad and the hard drive doubles in size. But I’d really want a 20″ one. And that would be another $300 more with another bump in processor speed and another doubling of hard drive size. In other words, almost $600 more than a Mac Mini. Can I justify either one of those choices? Would I be happy with a Mini?
6 responses so far ↓
1 Kurt // Mar 10, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I’d say get the mini and spend half of that $300 on a massive external hard drive. That’s what I’d do at least. Plus, then you’d have a backup drive for your notebook (if you don’t have one already), and speaking from experience, you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a hard drive failure without a backup.
2 Mark // Mar 10, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Thanks for the input, Kurt. I do have an external drive already that is bigger than my PC and PowerBook drives put together. With a mini, it’d be even bigger comparatively.
3 Em Tonkin // Mar 10, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Mac minis are cute.
My supervisor uses one. There’s only one problem with them, which is that given their lovely cute little form factor, they tend to use little notebook DVD drives from Panasonic. These can almost never be reflashed to RPC-1 firmware, because Panasonic are evil about firmware creation. However, being non-European I doubt that this will be a big deal from your perspective.
We hates region encoding, we does; we buys our DVDs from America because things is available on a more reasonable schedule :-/
Other than this admittedly minor detail, Macs are cute and you should possibly buy one; if my supervisor is happy with a Mac Mini then they must be rewarding, because he is quite picky about his choice of computing power
4 Mark // Mar 11, 2007 at 9:13 am
Thanks, Em and sorry it took so long to approve your comment. Somehow my IP got caught by my host’s firewall and I couldn’t get in to approve it, or do anything else.
I’m not sure cute is my prime motivating factor, but cute is good in its own right. But then I’m the guy who thinks reading Svenonius in public may just get me a date some day. Clearly, I don’t know cute.
5 Sara // Mar 13, 2007 at 6:50 am
This is a delayed comment, but - for what it’s worth - I bought a new computer last year and went with a clearance item that was nice and cheap but had more than my old computer so I figured it was a good deal. Looking back, I really wish I had waited and spent a bit more to get a *really* good machine. I don’t think we can ever really anticipate how much room we need for growth when it comes to technology. An external hard drive is great, but you can’t run programs off of it. If this new equipment only needs to last you a year or two, the Mac Mini can’t be beat. On the other hand, if you’re hoping to get at least five years or more then you’d probably be much, much happier with a beauty of a 24″ iMac, 2GB of memory and that wonderful 250GB hard drive. Oh, how I wish I’d waited.
6 Mark // Mar 13, 2007 at 9:48 am
While I would greatly love a 24″ iMac, that simply is *not* happening. There’s no way I can afford that! Heck, I’d love a 20′ iMac but still not happening probably.
I did discover that my wireless keyboard and mouse may not work with a mini, so that adds to the price there. I imagine I best wait until I figure out my tax situation this year, but I’ll probably go with a 1.83 GHz mini with 1 GB of RAM and a 120 GB HD.
While my PowerBook is getting banged up a bit, it should still do me for a while still and I certainly hope the mini would last me more than a year or two. I might covet something more powerful, but I don’t really *need* it.