james mckay dot net

Well just a couple of days after I reinstalled Windows on my laptop, the screen finally decided to die. This means that until I get it replaced, I’m offline in the evenings and at weekends. It’s about time I replaced my laptop anyway though. It’s now nearly four years old, and while it’s still perfectly serviceable, it’s beginning to get a bit geriatric in computer terms now. It weighs a ton and feels like having a fan heater sitting on your lap, it gets that hot.

I think this will give my wrists a bit of a well-earned rest. They’ve been getting a bit sore with my recent experiments with /(Dvor|Colem)ak/. Shai Coleman, the designer of Colemak, responded to a comment that I made on the Colemak forums saying that you do experience some discomfort initially, but it goes if you persist. However, I am still on qwerty at work and that isn’t likely to change now.

I’ll still be blogging when I get a chance, however. I’ll just be relying on pen and paper a lot more for the first draft of each entry. I think this speeds up the process somewhat though. I tend to be something of a perfectionist at times: I find it all too easy to either (a) over-research my blog posts, or (b) spend too long editing, chopping and changing them, and just having a pen and paper puts a bit of a restraining hand on me from both these tendencies, since I have to write it all offline in one pass without recourse to Wikipedia.

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Posted at 18:13 on 3 July 2007.
Tagged: blogging, colemak, dvorak, laptop

After three weeks or so of running Ubuntu on my laptop at home as my primary OS, I reinstalled Windows on it yesterday evening. No doubt this is a move that will meet with howls of derision from everyone who expects me to be an über-geek, and the bearded sandal-wearing idealists who think that Microsoft should be nuked, but the fact is that I just don’t think much of Linux on the desktop. It’s more secure and more stable than Windows, and less prone to spyware and all that, and it has some great geeky features (I just love that 3D Sierpinski screensaver) but it has one big problem: visual aesthetics.

Besides Ubuntu’s depressing brown colour scheme, which makes it look like a plate of mince, the biggest problem is fonts. Ubuntu’s default out of the box fonts are ghastly, dumpy, squat monstrosities, and the rendering engines in both Gnome and KDE are pathetic, giving uneven stroke widths and nasty colour fringing even on the Windows core fonts, no matter what settings I used for the sub-pixel rendering. I think they must be using a similar approach to Apple, in attempting to preserve font shapes over and above on-screen crispness and readability, though Apple does it a lot better. Or maybe I’m just spoilt: once you have seen ClearType in action on Windows, the Linux sub-pixel font rendering seems pretty lame by comparison.

Another thing about Linux is software. I really missed Windows Live Writer, especially having used the new beta 2 version with its much improved WordPress support, and while I guess I could have tried installing it using Wine, I decided in the light of the fonts issue not to bother. There are a couple of equivalents available for Linux, such as Drivel, but they are nowhere near as slick as Windows Live Writer. I also much prefer Corel Draw (and Paint.NET for the simpler stuff) to the Gimp, Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and of course I was missing out on Visual Studio.

This isn’t to say that I won’t be using Linux at all of course. I have been running Ubuntu servers on VMWare both at work and at home and I will almost certainly continue to do so. I don’t know if I’ll try a desktop installation of Ubuntu on VMWare though: when I’ve done this in the past it tends to get neglected somewhat, though it does occasionally come in useful for things such as testing cross-browser compatibility. However, I don’t think I’ll be making much use of it as a primary OS in the immediate future.

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Posted at 22:41 on 30 June 2007.
Tagged: laptop, Ubuntu, Windows, Windows Live Writer

Another phone call from Dell yesterday. Apparently my laptop’s motherboard was covered by the warranty. The “spillage” affects the screen, and looks like this:

This bit of rust in the bottom right hand corner of the screen chassis is supposedly causing discoloration across the whole display for about twenty seconds when it resumes from standby, or at lower brightness levels. This seems a bit far fetched to me, especially since the discoloration appears first on the left hand side of the screen when the brightness is turned down.

Incidentally, about a month ago, Dell settled in a class action lawsuit brought by owners of the same model of laptop as mine — the Inspiron 5150 — in the States. It has a reputation for getting so hot that it melts the case, trashes the motherboard and shuts down unexpectedly. The case on mine was intact, but it still felt a bit like having a fan heater sitting on your legs, and I did find it a bit annoying that it kept shutting down if anything worked the processor or the video card too hard. It seems a bit better since it was fixed, but it still gets pretty warm.

Still, it’s working again, and the discoloration is a relatively minor fault, certainly not one worth spending three hundred pounds on, so I won’t complain too much. Besides which, if the screen does go completely belly up, I can upgrade to a higher resolution one for a good bit less than what they were quoting.

Okay, now that’s wrapped it all up, perhaps I can somehow get on with the business of writing ten consecutive computer-free, geekiness-free, get-a-life blog entries…

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Posted at 16:40 on 27 September 2006.
Tagged: customer support, Dell, laptop

I’m beginning to think I ought to set up another category for this…

Just taken delivery of my laptop. It has had the motherboard repaired, but not the screen, which was also faulty, though not disastrously so. Ubuntu now boots up without complaining. I think I can live with that.

I had another high-blood-pressure conversation with Dell customer services this morning and I am still none the wiser as to whether I am going to be slapped with a bill for this or not. I specifically instructed them not to carry out any chargeable work until I have had an opportunity to have the parts concerned independently inspected, so if I am, I shall not be pleased.

Sometimes I feel sorry for the people who work in these call centres. They must get a lot of ear-bashing from irate customers like me. So if any of them are reading this, I just have this to say: please don’t take it personally.

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Posted at 13:29 on 25 September 2006.
Tagged: customer support, Dell, laptop

It looks like I chose a bad time to set myself a ten-blog-entries-without-mentioning-computers challenge.

Dell are refusing to fix my laptop under warranty.

I got a call from them on Tuesday saying that the cause of the problem was that I’d spilled some liquid or other on it, and they wanted to charge me £295 to fix it. The warranty does not cover accidental damage.

Needless to say, I was rather upset about this, not least because to the best of my knowledge, neither I nor anyone else has ever spilled anything on the machine. I’ve asked them to return it to me unrepaired so that I can have it independently inspected.

I’ve been a bit unsure exactly how to proceed here. My gut reaction is to fight: it’s a good laptop, and though I could get a new computer for that price, I don’t think I could get one to match its specification, even though it is now three years old. On the other hand, I’d already been thinking of replacing it with a new desktop PC once we move house. Besides, it’s sometimes better to just swallow your losses and move on rather than stress yourself out about this kind of thing.

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Posted at 18:56 on 22 September 2006.
Tagged: customer support, Dell, laptop

I got this e-mail from Dell customer services this morning in response to my blog entry of yesterday:

James:
I’m at Dell Headquarters in the US and just came across your post about the tech support experience with your laptop.  I apologize for all of the difficulty in getting the repairs underway and would have to say that it does not sound typical.  Even though the other operating systems are not supported I would be inclined to agree that they can still help confirm that the nature of the problem is hardware related.  By the point that you swapped hard drives and the issue persisted it should have officially been declared a hardware issue.  At this point the laptop is probably at a repair depot already but if there is anything I can do from here to help let me know.
Neil

Nice to know that they take customer support seriously. It’s just been picked up a few minutes ago and is now winging its way up to Birmingham, courtesy of DHL.

According to my referrer logs, he got to me from page eleven of a search on Google Blog Search for “Dell” at 19:17:24 GMT last night. Seems like Dell are paying people like Neil to read our blogs to find out what’s being said about them, and responding quickly. Smart move. So thanks Neil — apologies accepted.

Since you’ve asked, though, here’s something you can do to help. Stop using 0870 numbers for hardware support. They’re expensive. Heck, I’ve already paid for the warranty…

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Posted at 13:35 on 14 September 2006.
Tagged: customer support, Dell, laptop

We had a media fast in church last week. No TV, no radio, no Internet, no editing Wikipedia, no blogging. For me, it was enforced by a faulty laptop.

Yesterday, the fast being over, I decided to get down to the business of getting it repaired. I took out a three year warranty when I bought the thing, and I decided that since I’d paid for it, I might as well make use of it. So, with only a fortnight to go before said warranty runs out, I decided to get on the blower to Dell.

Despite the initial assurances from the Dalek on the other end that I would have to wait half an hour before speaking to a real human being, I was on the phone to the usual moonlighting undergraduate in Bangalore within ten minutes, whose job, it seemed, was to try and convince me that it was a software problem.

Now I know for certain that this was a hardware problem. The machine was locking up when I booted into Windows. It was locking up when I booted into Windows safe mode. It was locking up when I booted into SuSE Linux. It was locking up when I booted into Ubuntu. It was locking up when I booted into an Ubuntu live CD.

He got me to spend half an hour running the diagnostics on the machine, taking it to pieces and putting it back together again before saying, “It’s obviously a software problem. I’ll have to transfer you to the software support department, and you will be charged for this.”

Fine. So that’s the name of the game. Refuse to believe that it’s a hardware problem. Transfer me to the software support department. What will they do? No doubt they’d ask me a string of questions, tell me that they can’t help me because I’m running an unsupported operating system but it’s obviously a hardware problem anyway, transfer me back to the hardware department, raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels and charge me a hundred quid for the pleasure.

No thanks.

I’m sure that your average punter would fall for something like this, and no doubt the undergraduate in Bangalore, having dealt with twenty average punters in the course of the evening, thought I was another average punter.

The only thing is, I’m not an average punter. I’m a geek, who knows that software problems simply do not manifest them on three different operating systems on two separate hard disks and a live CD. Yet it still took me the best part of an hour to convince the guy of this fact and persuade him to send out someone to take the thing in for servicing.

And 0870 phone numbers are expensive. Gah.

So the thing’s being picked up tomorrow sometime and taken away for repair. My media fast is being extended for however many more working days Dell see fit to take to fix the thing.

Oh well, I think this will do me a bit of good. I normally spend far too much time at the computer anyway (something Mum is always complaining about) and it’s given me an opportunity to get on with some packing. We’re moving house in only two weeks and there is still a stack of things to do.

So, if you are wondering about the dearth of blog entries and Wikipedia edits on my part, that’s why.

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Posted at 18:38 on 13 September 2006.
Tagged: church, customer support, Dell, laptop, media fast