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My DSL is in lousy shape (not much downstream bandwidth). Someone from covad is supposed to be coming out on Monday to look at it.
I may have gotten my PC working without crashes. I hope. I replaced the video card (twice: G400 -> Radeon 8500 -> GeForce4 4400) and network card and reinstalled Windows XP. Now I'm in the slow process of rebuilding my machine to a useful state. Pixel USA took the Radeon 8500 back without hassle despite it being a day past the 7 day return period.
Meanwhile, while on the phone with the Speakeasy tech trying to troubleshoot DSL this morning and, while moving things around in the closet hooking up the laptop to the DSL modem directly, I pulled a cable and the DSL modem fell on the laptop, breaking the \ key. After I got off the phone with Speakeasy (with no progress, as I said, a covad tech is coming out Monday), I called Dell to learn that it'd be $269 to have Dell fix the keyboard PLUS $179 for the keyboard part. \ sucked anyway. I may order the keyboard and try to replace it myself. It doesn't look very hard. But I'm going to wait until the broken \ key bugs me $179-worth. Stupid stupid stupid. It could be worse, though; it could've broken something more serious. And the \ still works, there's just no keycap.
I may have gotten my PC working without crashes. I hope. I replaced the video card (twice: G400 -> Radeon 8500 -> GeForce4 4400) and network card and reinstalled Windows XP. Now I'm in the slow process of rebuilding my machine to a useful state. Pixel USA took the Radeon 8500 back without hassle despite it being a day past the 7 day return period.
Meanwhile, while on the phone with the Speakeasy tech trying to troubleshoot DSL this morning and, while moving things around in the closet hooking up the laptop to the DSL modem directly, I pulled a cable and the DSL modem fell on the laptop, breaking the \ key. After I got off the phone with Speakeasy (with no progress, as I said, a covad tech is coming out Monday), I called Dell to learn that it'd be $269 to have Dell fix the keyboard PLUS $179 for the keyboard part. \ sucked anyway. I may order the keyboard and try to replace it myself. It doesn't look very hard. But I'm going to wait until the broken \ key bugs me $179-worth. Stupid stupid stupid. It could be worse, though; it could've broken something more serious. And the \ still works, there's just no keycap.
