Tech Support

Some years ago—

<you the man dog>

never mind how long precisely—

<pound the keys!>

I had a problem with my computer. I was sitting there on a warm summer's day, burblsmacking along at something or other when I heard a sharp, physical <SNAP!> from the tower of the desktop.

No smoke, no fire, no clue.

I shutdown and restarted, and life continued as usual for... a while. A year? Six months?

I never really noted the initial noise. Maybe it had been a sound effect?

So a while later it happened again. Again in a hot season, but this time the noise was followed by a failure, the computer rebooted itself without being asked to, without going through all the motions of “...has not been properly shutdown, would you like to continue?” &c.

But it started up fine that time until a Third Impact a short time later, and then things started to get all Hollywood janky. Images not loading, screen flickering, clicks just not clicking whether offline or on.

So I took it to the local repair shop a mile up the road. Without a car, that's stuffing a compact desktop tower into your Jansport Mozambique and hopping on your bicycle in the late summer heat.

They took a look at it.

They said it was a burnt-out fan. I paid them some moneys to replace the fan.

But when it came back it still didn't work right.

The problems continued, so I took it back to them for another look, and they found out that it wasn't a problem with the fan.

It was a problem with some capacitors that had blown. Little aluminum cans, a row of four of them, and three had popped out like the Champagne Popper fireworks I bought as a kid, streamers of brown packing material sprayed across the circuitry.

Somehow they hadn't noticed.

They refunded my money but told me that those capacitors were an integral part of my motherboard, and that my computer, five years since I'd purchased it, was six years out of date.

The told me I needed a new computer entirely; that generation of motherboard was no longer available as a replacement part.

So I tried to keep it going, but after a week or two I realized it was hopeless and went down to the electronics store to get a new one. The old one had lasted slightly beyond its projected lifespan, after all, and this is just the way of the world with electronics. No harm, no foul.

All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events.

Spoiler: -Paul Harvey

All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events.

But I don't blog about planned obsolescence.

Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, my mother suffered a stroke. And a heart attack, but I don't remember which one happened first.

She had been descending into a spiral of cliches anyway (“Life is real, it is what it is, so Vera says to me, she says, Vera says...”)

The display was readable, but a little janky.

And then last October, right around her 74th birthday, she had another stroke.

A big one.

It blew the last ten years out of her head.

She missed the cats, but the wrong ones. She knew the house, but hadn't lived in it yet.

She had been a woman who would talk the ear off of a lamp-post, bragging about her son who lived in Japan.

Her roommate at the care facility said “She don't talk much. Your mom's a pretty quiet woman.”

I had the chance to go back in February 2020.

Coronavirus was just “a disease that had been reported in China” at the time.

And last Friday I got word that she'd died.

So there we are.

No new motherboard available for the 1946 model at this point in time.