Well, here i am...
Apr. 12th, 2018 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterI've been doing some overtime at work for the last couple of weeks, waking up and coming in an hour early to score a little time-and-a-half. My manager told me today that things are less busy now so they don't need me coming in early anymore. Oh well. I got about 22 hours of overtime this month, all in all, which works out to a nice extra chunk of change. To celebrate the end of having to get up an hour early, I'm taking in a late movie on my MoviePass card, which I hadn't felt free to do while I was still working that extra hour in the morning. Tonight it's Isle of Dogs, which looked interestingly quirky from all the trailers.
Not that everything's quite so peachy lately. Now that I've got a working bigscreen TV downstairs, I've been in search of a solution to showing all the video services I watch on it. I've got my Chromecast, of course, but for shows on Amazon, or something like streaming Rabb.it, I'd need a full-fledged computer. And I thought I'd found the solution.
My 7-year-old laptop that I got for Christmas back in the day hadn't been working right for a while; it had an annoying habit of turning itself off a few seconds or minutes after I turned it on. I'd even tried getting a new battery for it to see if the problem was the old one not holding a charge. Turned out, it wasn't.
Now that I had a job and money, I decided to take it to a computer repair technician to get it fixed. So I checked Yelp for a local one, and found one with a lot of good reviews. There were only two one-star reviews, and the nature of the reviews suggested that those people were jerks anyway. The one problem was the guy was located halfway across town...but the reviews were good. So I rented a BlueIndy car and drove out to drop the laptop off. Then, the next weekend, I went to pick it up.
The guy charged me $100 for a heatsink recondition, because he thought it sounded like the laptop was overheating when I turned it on. That was a bit steep, but if it got me a working computer, it was still cheaper than the $200 to $300 a decent refurb would cost. So I paid it.
The problem was, when I got the laptop home, I discovered that the problem...hadn't actually been fixed. If I left the laptop sitting right where it was and only interacted with it by remote, with my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse, it worked fine, but if I moved it even a little bit, off it went. So I took it back to the repair guy, who didn't offer to refund any of the money I spent on a repair that didn't actually work, but promised he wouldn't charge any more labor on the job. (Yay.)
He did a little more troubleshooting, and determined that it actually had a short in the motherboard—so it effectively needed a new motherboard. And the cheapest one he could find was $150, and in France. He didn't think it was worth it, and I had to agree.
So in the end, I'm out $150 between the cash and the four trips back and forth to leave and pick up the laptop. That's about half what a decent refurbished Dell i5 laptop would cost. And my laptop doesn't work any better. Though I suppose I can make it work okay enough for now as a media player for my TV if I just leave it sitting in one place. Maybe I'll try to guilt-trip the guy a little when I go back on Saturday to pick it up, but I don't know if that'll do any good. On the bright side, I'm making about $250 extra this month before taxes, so I'm still ahead a little.
It's just a few minutes before the movie starts, so I suppose I'd better close this out and post it. I'm still the only person in the movie theater; don't know whether I'll still be by the time it starts. Maybe next week, if they're still showing it late night, I'll take in A Quiet Place. At least I shouldn't need to worry about too much noise from other viewers on a late-night weekday showing.
Not that everything's quite so peachy lately. Now that I've got a working bigscreen TV downstairs, I've been in search of a solution to showing all the video services I watch on it. I've got my Chromecast, of course, but for shows on Amazon, or something like streaming Rabb.it, I'd need a full-fledged computer. And I thought I'd found the solution.
My 7-year-old laptop that I got for Christmas back in the day hadn't been working right for a while; it had an annoying habit of turning itself off a few seconds or minutes after I turned it on. I'd even tried getting a new battery for it to see if the problem was the old one not holding a charge. Turned out, it wasn't.
Now that I had a job and money, I decided to take it to a computer repair technician to get it fixed. So I checked Yelp for a local one, and found one with a lot of good reviews. There were only two one-star reviews, and the nature of the reviews suggested that those people were jerks anyway. The one problem was the guy was located halfway across town...but the reviews were good. So I rented a BlueIndy car and drove out to drop the laptop off. Then, the next weekend, I went to pick it up.
The guy charged me $100 for a heatsink recondition, because he thought it sounded like the laptop was overheating when I turned it on. That was a bit steep, but if it got me a working computer, it was still cheaper than the $200 to $300 a decent refurb would cost. So I paid it.
The problem was, when I got the laptop home, I discovered that the problem...hadn't actually been fixed. If I left the laptop sitting right where it was and only interacted with it by remote, with my Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse, it worked fine, but if I moved it even a little bit, off it went. So I took it back to the repair guy, who didn't offer to refund any of the money I spent on a repair that didn't actually work, but promised he wouldn't charge any more labor on the job. (Yay.)
He did a little more troubleshooting, and determined that it actually had a short in the motherboard—so it effectively needed a new motherboard. And the cheapest one he could find was $150, and in France. He didn't think it was worth it, and I had to agree.
So in the end, I'm out $150 between the cash and the four trips back and forth to leave and pick up the laptop. That's about half what a decent refurbished Dell i5 laptop would cost. And my laptop doesn't work any better. Though I suppose I can make it work okay enough for now as a media player for my TV if I just leave it sitting in one place. Maybe I'll try to guilt-trip the guy a little when I go back on Saturday to pick it up, but I don't know if that'll do any good. On the bright side, I'm making about $250 extra this month before taxes, so I'm still ahead a little.
It's just a few minutes before the movie starts, so I suppose I'd better close this out and post it. I'm still the only person in the movie theater; don't know whether I'll still be by the time it starts. Maybe next week, if they're still showing it late night, I'll take in A Quiet Place. At least I shouldn't need to worry about too much noise from other viewers on a late-night weekday showing.
