“Seth v. The Hardware: So Far, We're Tied”

On December 8th I mentioned that the hardware is the enemy, referring to the fact that I've had a very difficult time with PC hardware over the years (and bicycle hardware, now that I think about it).

The server I was fighting with that day just lost another battle in this particular war: it's been successfully upgraded from a 750 Mhz athlon to a 1.4 Ghz Athlon.

Kicked it's virtual butt, I did.

Actually, the problem was a defective motherboard. What bothers me is that we had to pay to ship it back to Thompson Computer Warehouse (the vendor) for the replacement. I guess it's their policy to make customers pay extra when they ship defective merchandise.

Why should it cost me anything? Ooh, that bugs me.

On the other hand, their tech support team -- all of whom have names beginning with the letter 'J', something they found pretty amusing -- were absolutely top notch. It was like they build the motherboard themselves, and were watching me with a hidden camera while I worked on it.