Computers...

OK, the technician came and put a new motherboard in the laptop. He started up diagnostics and told me to let them run for an hour. I went to lunch. About 20 minutes into it, Dave came and said that the laptop was dead again.

I came back to my office; sure enough, it was dead. Well, we figured the battery might have died, so we plugged the AC adapter in and restarted diagnostics. This time I sat at my desk reading while diagnostics ran. About 2/3 of the way through the memory test, it died again. Completely, ded, no power, nothing. Ouch. So, I called Dell and got a very pleasant customer service person. She didn't read a script, she actually interacted with me as a human being! Amazing.

Well, we tried a bunch of stuff and nothing got anywhere. Since it was a new motherboard, she figured (and I agreed) that it must be bad memory that the motherboard had damaged when it died. So, I am now awaiting 2 DIMMs of memory to arrive tomorrow.

Meantime, Dave stole me a desktop that I am using, so I now have e-mail. The hard drive in the laptop is good and we recovered all my files, so I can access those.

Considering what it could have been, this is nothing. But, I would have preferred it didn't happen at all :)