Yeah, I know, if I complain too much about me, it will create a self-referential vortex and suck everything in the Universe into a black hole of complainingness. But I had to share this.
I’ve probably complained about my computer before. A quick search turns up nothing, but I must have mentioned the utter hatred I have for my Dell laptop. I had a Dell desktop in college that was great. I used it for years. Then I bought an Inspiron 9100 that has been nothing but trouble. The fan runs all the time. The power supply is almost as big as my cat. The DVD-RW broke. It’s slow and clunky and just generally irritating.
This morning, I took off some panels on the bottom, looking for the memory sticks. I wanted to see if I could buy a cheap stick of 512 MB and speed the stupid thing up, or if I’d have to replace the 256 MB sticks in there already. Sure enough, the computer has two slots and two 256s. Not surprising.
But the first panel I pulled off housed a fan. It looked dusty, so I pulled it out to clean it off. Imagine my surprise (Although, truthfully, I shouldn’t have been surprised, and this is why the complaint is about me) when the vent between the fan and the outside world was completely clogged with dust. I don’t mean it was a little dirty. I mean it was blocked. If that vent was the only source of air in the room you were in, you’d die.
The fan on the other side of the computer was in the same condition. I cleaned out the dust, restarted the computer, and voila! It’s quiet again. And it runs faster. Not as fast as I’d like, but nearly as fast as a P4 3.2 gig processor with 512 MB of RAM can be expected to run.
So, now I feel a bit dumb. Here I’ve been complaining about how crappy my computer is, and all it really needed for a significant performance boost was a quick cleaning.
I’m sorry, Dell. You probably only deserve 40-60% of the hatred I throw your way. If the computer continues to perform adequately, I might even take you off the Never Buy List.