People sometimes perceive as me some sort of technical whiz, and perhaps that’s true if you compare me to, say, my mom, who had trouble with the concept of double-clicking when forced to use a computer at her job. (She’s been retired for a number of years now.) And my co-workers certainly think I’m a miracle worker when it comes to writing scripts that cut a three-day manual job down to 30 seconds.<\/p>\n
But when hardware breaks down, I’m dumb. I own my dumbness. I am not an electrical engineer, and after years of working with computers, I couldn’t begin to tell you what the hell happens inside the damn thing.<\/p>\n
So this morning, I turn my computer on only to hear the fan whir like it’s about to take off the runway. I cut the power and plug it back in. Same thing. I conclude it’s a bum hard drive, although I have this nagging suspicion it might be something on the motherboard itself.<\/p>\n
The drive was purchased nearly a month ago, so I took the old one and put it back in the computer. Luckily, I hadn’t wiped anything off of it. The computer started up with no problem — no fan sounding like it’s about to fly out of the room. Conclusion: hard drive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I brought the drive to work to format it before I took it back to Fry’s for a refund. It did seem odd to me that the drive would have no issue running from an enclosure. But I didn’t pursue that line of thought. (Perhaps because I knew it would lead to the idea of something more serious than a bum hard drive.)<\/p>\n
I was a few days shy of missing to cut-off date for a refund, and I looked around the shelves to see if anything was on sale. Nope. I knew Best Buy had 500GB drives for sale, so I got one there. The drive I returned was $108.24 (also on sale). The one I bought cost $130.50.<\/p>\n
When I got home, I re-cloned the drive, which took a number of hours, and put it back in the machine.<\/p>\n
Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.<\/p>\n
Shit. It’s been the heatsink all this time. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate as such. There’s 42 days left on the computer’s warranty, so I called technical support. After describing the situation, the guy told me what I kind of suspected — need new heatsink.<\/p>\n
So what did my lack of hardware savvy cost me? An addition $22 for a new hard drive, when the previous one probably wasn’t broken in the first place. And $27 for a new heatsink.<\/p>\n
Being dumb can cost you money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When hardware breaks down, I’m dumb. I own my dumbness. I am not an electrical engineer,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-3K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}