GearWERKZ TechBlog

After the 8000-series Dell, I graduated to my first Gateway laptop. It was more a matter of convenience rather than a matter of conscious choice. I was in San Diego at the time for a brief, 2 month stint. I had been on the road for 4 months since having left Washington State in February. Getting another Dell shipped was not something I had broken the code on yet, although I would a month later when I ordered a replacement Dell desktop and had it shipped to Mail Boxes Etc.

Follow up:

Not yet having the where with all to determine how to get a Dell shipped to me while I did not really have my own address, I was relegated to buying something at retail. The move was prompted by a Lemony Snicket set of circumstances that had developed over the summer.

On my first layover in Dahlgen, VA, I had experienced my first blown Power Supply in my secondary desktop. I made a few initial attempts to troubleshoot it by buying parts, not a small feat when, again, I had no address that I could tell Newegg to ship stuff to. So I was out trying to buy things on the economy. The first items I bought, a processor and new memory, did not return the desktop to working condition. You see, I did not make the diagnosis that it was a bad power supply until after I bought these things and they did not work. I was now certainly looking at at least a bad power supply or motherboard. At this point, I decided that I was not in a good position to continue trying to troubleshoot this on the road. I chose to junk the tower. Trying to salvage parts could have just led to stuffing bad parts into a new build, then having something not work that was difficult to identify without a lot of effort.

This drove me to, before the Gateway, buy a new tower, stock, to replace the old backup tower. In truth, what I wound up buying was a new main tower, the current main tower going to backup duties. I had surmised that going my normal route and trying to build a new machine on the road was also not a good idea. Every once in a while, in the course of building a new PC, there is a bad part. Troubleshooting often involves using my on-hand, known good, spares. I did not have those with me. At the extremes, it sometimes involves buying replacement parts. Another proposition that was not good while I was on the road. Add that, again, I was not going to be selecting these parts for shipment from NewEgg, which drove the costs up. I also wanted to migrate to WindowsXP. XP was very network oriented for getting drivers and updates. With only a guarantee of dial-up connectivity in my hotel rooms, having to potentially download a ton of updates and drivers was also not a welcome thought. Buying something stock meant having a unit that would work out of the box, and likely be stable enough until I finished my road trip and moved into my place in Mississippi.

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