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August 2003 Archive
Saturday, August 30, 2003
[Comments: 0] 2:37 AM - rock-and-a-hard-place
I thought this was an interesting article. It basically describes the completely absurd setup procedure for a Dell computer which indicates that the installation of your PC is contigent upon agreements to EULAs that you cannot possibly read under any reasonable circumstances without implied agreement prior to actually being able to read them.
As the article mentions, it seems as if they are starting to just not bother even shipping the paperwork under the assumption it's just going to get ignored anyway. I find it especially interesting that Dell did not actually prepare any means for providing the license paperwork to End Users after the fact.
Also, the article mentions that the Customer Service manager had never seen an issue of this type in the past, which seems to indicate that only one single user has ever actually seriously attempted to follow the directions on a new Dell PC's startup screen. Millions of PCs have been produced and sold by Dell, but only one person has ever actually bothered (to try) to read the fine print that shipped with his machine.
Saturday, August 16, 2003
[Comments: 0] 2:49 PM - could-have-been-worse
Recently, I started to notice that Windows XP would freeze randomly overnight. Linux didn't do this, so I thought it might be related to a software problem in Windows XP, but I couldn't find anything in XP's system logs to confirm this. Then, a few days later, I was sitting at my computer and it sounded like one or both of my hard drives were occasionally spinning down and then back up. I would hear this in both Windows and Linux and my computer never actually froze while I was using it, but having a hard drive shut down unexpectedly certainly seemed like a prime way to make an OS freeze up.
I knew I had no power saving features enabled for my drives, and I was starting to worry that there might be a hardware problem with one of them, but I couldn't actually figure out which hard drive was causing the problem. The SMART status for both drives came up fine. I let it go for a few days (during which it did not do anything unusual) and started to back up my data just in case.
Last night, the drive started to act up again, so I decided to pull off the side of the case and have a look. I noticed that a power cable going to into the upper hard drive was crooked, so I tried to carefully push it back into position. It wouldn't go back, but as I let go of it, I noticed that the hard drive cycled power again. After shutting down my computer, I looked over the cable, and noticed that one of the plug sockets was deformed, and would no longer (or perhaps never did) fit the pin, so a light vibration would periodically cause a temporary power disconnection. I added another power spitter to the case, since I have no extra connectors on my power supply, and all seems to be well.
Thankfully, my drives do not appear to be failing. :)
