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Well what an eventful week. I shall be writing a series of entries over the next two days about everything that has happened.

First topic: New heat sink and fan.

One week ago, last Tuesday (20/05/08) I shut down my machine due to failure in the internet, there was no reason to leave it on if I couldn’t get connected. However, on Wednesday the following day, I boot up only to be hit with a stop error screen!

What! Re-starting I become puzzled, only to be hit with another stop error! What!! After a second re-start I see a screen telling me I have an incompatible bios, which I get twice so decide that’s the issue.

I heads off to the computer shop to see Carl and find out what he makes of it, to which he becomes as confused as me, never coming across the issue before. I’m all for new findings but not with pc’s.

After some initial prodding and un-connecting, we ruled out a memory fault; hard disk fault; optical drive fault; and power pack fault. Leaving us only the processor and motherboard.

As I had jumped the que of other jobs on the bench further fault finding was left for a few days. Further investigation lead us to try a new motherboard, which had to be ordered in. So, having finally received the new mobo, the bits where un-screwed; un-slotted; and un-plugged, to which Carl noticed the heat sink wasn’t sat correctly over the processor.

Hmm, that can cause an over heat, and we don’t like that. Trying out an old heat sink my machine booted up and ran first try. All that waiting eh.

I now have myself a brand new one, which screws into a backplate instead of some weired clips ‘holding’ it to the mobo. I must say it looks nicer, and is supposed to run quieter but doesn’t.

So after eight days of inactivity I’m back on-line again.

I decided yesterday was the right time to order my brand new laptop, an Inspiron 1525 which looks great and comes with some nifty stuff.

At 23:52pm my order was sent through, and I received acknowledgment via email about it. Having just checked my email box a few moments ago I had another mail from Dell, confirming my order. Upon reading this I noticed the ‘Estimated Delivery Date’ (27/05/2008).
Well, clicking the order status link and reading the top box it said:

Your order has been dispatched as of 12/05/2008

Wow, dispatched somewhere within 20 hours! The delivery will take about 2-5 days though, which means I hopefully get my new toy before the weekend.

I’m now impressed, the drastic thoughts of it having st00pid vista pre-installed are slowly residing as I shall be formatting direct to Xubuntu, due to the Ubuntu and Kubuntu cd’s being in delivery aswell. I don’t burn iso’s very well so prefer to have a disk done for me.
I did try to get the same machine with Ubuntu pre-installed but it wasn’t to the same specifications, and the price was the same. Logic then dictated to buy the better box and format completely. I won’t be dual booting, I’ve never tried it before but who honestly wants to keep vista. I’m now another statistic though, which is disappointing.

As always, I shall update with comments below when the situation changes. Who knows, the laptop may arrive early.

Now XPS – P3 would be such a cool name! XPS is total hardcore, while P3, well I’m not too sure about the P3 to be honest.

Anywhoo, why not be late? The second release candidate for this service pack has been around for a week now; and the news of SP3 has been around since last year, but I’ve only known of it for two weeks! Two weeks is well laaaaaaaame.

As I haven’t blogged much else I’ve decided to have my say. So there. Microsoft “loves” .. us?

This pack will include all of the previously released updates for SP2, which is good seeing as how I don’t install them.

I dare say this so called news won’t really appeal much since when I manage to buy my laptop I’ll be installing Ubuntu onto the desktop! .. and no, I won’t be buying a vista run laptop!! Don’t get me wrong, it looks nice and everything, I just prefer it on someone else’s machine.

If I have no luck with my laptop I may go for one of those air thingies, you know, with an apple on it. I would need a wage package first though! Starting at £1199, that’s just like asking the guy wearing the ski mask to hold your money.

I suppose if the pack is fully released before I become employed I’ll install it and break everything.

Due to my recent hard-drive death I have lost my Website Development ICA when the formatting took place.

I hadn’t managed to upload it to my server which I regret.
The deadline is June 1st so I’ll have the opportunity to redo it, whether I should bother to I can’t decide, since I’ll be failing the course anyway; leaving university life; and looking for training and work with web design employers. This will be more beneficial to me as I will learn a lot more and have an equal chance to gain a qualification while training with a company.

I may decide to do it, and add it into my portfolio.

Late one evening I was aimlessly minding my own business on my computer when, for no reason at all, my machine restarts itself.

Panic kicks in at this point, as it re-boots and comes up against a blue screen with error messages. I switch it off and restart, but once again the blue screen, so I repeat the process and this time I have an apology screen and some options. Trying these in vain I had to take my machine to the shop for repair.

Initial diagnosis, windows was corrupt. A repair was initiated but wouldn’t run, and actual hard-drive corruption was thought to be the problem. After a few weeks of nothing, and no data recovery possible, the disk was formatted and OS re-installed.

Back at home I switched the computer on and it started. However, after about two hours of re-installing programs and system tweaks, boom .. the machine re-boots.

So it’s now back in the shop to undergo more testing with some new software. Hopefully it will be fine otherwise I’ll need to purchase a new £36, 80-gig SATA hard-drive.

I won’t be paying for diagnosis and repair since the problem wasn’t solved and it cost £55 the previous time.

Fingers crossed I have it back for Thursday, the IF web Design Competition has been extended again until then.