Tet's Journal: I hate PC hardware

So it came to pass that I ran out of disk space in my server. No problem. Storage is cheap, so I went and bought myself a couple of 750GB disks, from two different manufacturers, to turn into a RAID1 mirror. So far, so good. On a whim, I shut down my desktop machine (which uses the server for NFS/NIS/DNS etc) before taking the server down. Once the disks were installed, the server came back up fine... but my desktop refused to boot :-(

The machine powered up, fans were whirring away, but all I got was a blank screen, not even getting as far as showing the BIOS POST information. No diagnostic beeps. Nothing. A bit of digging and judicious unplugging of everything in turn revealed it to be a bad memory stick. Of course, as is the way of PC hardware, not only does it fail frequently, but when it does, it's considered obsolete, so you can't easily replace it anyway. My local PC components shop no longer sells DDR400 RAM, so I'll have to get some mail order, which will no doubt take forever. In the mean time, I'm limping along with 512MB RAM. Sigh...

local PC shop

[Penguin Follower]

Is your local PC shop pretty small? The closest decent shop to me still carries PC133 (off brand 512MB modules) in addition to DDR 266/333/400 & up.

Re:

[Tet]

No, it's reasonably large and has quite a decent range. Indeed, it does still sell DDR400 memory, but only in 256MB sticks, which are of no use to me.

Re:

[Penguin Follower]

Agreed on 256MB not being enough. I've got an odd assortment of 256MB sticks of various DDR speeds and can't get rid of them other than to give them away. And sometimes even that's hard!

Re:

[Corporate Troll]

Want my postal address?

Re:

[Tet]

Thanks for the offer, but I've already bought a replacement. It shipped yesterday, and should arrive today :-)

Re:

[Corporate Troll]

Small misunderstanding. I gave away my last 512Meg DDR stick to someone overseas. (I just don't remember his slashdot nick, though I remember his real name. I think so at least: I may still have a lower than DDR-400 rated stick.) I was asking Penguin Follower for his 256Meg sticks.

Thing is: current dumpster diving finds seem to be DDR-material and usually they only have 1x256Meg in them. Adding a second 256Meg ups it to 512Meg which is usually livable for a low-usage office/browsing machine. I could eve

Re:

[Tet]

D'oh! I really should learn to read the grandparent post before replying. My reply completely failed to make any sense anyway.

Ho hum. New memory has just arrived.

Re:

[Corporate Troll]

Don't worry.... How much RAM did you get in the end?

Re:

[Tet]

I bought an extra 2GB to go with the existing 512MB

Re:

[Penguin Follower]

If you want them, contact me at the email address listed in my profile.

As the old adage goes:

[jawtheshark]

Fast, Cheap, Reliable... Pick two...

PC Hardware falls by definition in the category Fast/Cheap.

Hardware always fails when it's inconvenient. If it isn't because you can't get the components, then it's because you don't have the time to fix it.

You can be happy that you even have local PC part vendors. I have a few around, but they are extremely overpriced and only stock the bleeding edge. I understand why: they cater for the PC Game enthousiast who doesn't really care about reliable.

This means, I am by d