Category: Personal

Laptop Adventures

Only a few months after I got my Dell XPS m1330 laptop, it just broke. Didn’t boot, graphics card failure. I might have used it a bit more than Joe Public, but I was really surprised that this occured as the laptop was only half a year old. Dell’s support, however, seems to be very quick – it took them only two days to send a technician who replaced the mainboard (and graphics card that is built onto the mainboard).

My first attempt to reach the Dell’s support team was to send in an email using the email support system they provide on their website. So I precisely entered all the necessary infos, and pressed the submit button. Guess what. “We are sorry, but our email system is currently out of order.” I then called the support hotline and everything was taken care of very quickly.

Weekends

Maybe weekends exist so that you can relax. Sometimes this works really well. Getting up late, hanging around, eating or just zapping for hours. However, sometimes I kinda feel like weekends are there so that you can do all the stuff you failed or forgot to do during the other five days of the week. And no, I’m not talking about drinking alcohol, because you didn’t have the time to before the weekend.

A weekend can be the time for personal creativity, for all the ideas and visions to pursue, for all the interesting things to figure out. And then…all of a sudden…the weekend is over…

Dangerous Graz

As some of the readers of this blog might already know, I am a rather peaceful guy. I do not tend to be aggressive against other people. This morning, when I took the bus to the office, and the bus was just one station before my destination, about five guys entered the bus. They were rather young, about 15 or 16 years old, except one of them who was probably 18 or 19 years old and seemed to be their leader.

All of a sudden they started chanting “Sieg Heil” and “Heil Hitler”. Neither one of the other passengers nor I said a word. I was pretty shocked, but didn’t even look at them. Then one of them asked me something which I don’t remember exactly, maybe something like what my problem was. I still didn’t say anything. Next, the bus stopped and we all got out. The oldest one grunted that he would knock me out, and I still said nothing. He pushed me and I asked him if he could explain his reasons in words, but obviously he couldn’t. I was already heading towards the office when they starting running after me, trying to kick at me. To be more precise, the old one told his younger comrades to attack. As I was not turning around every second to see what they were doing, the first one’s foot actually hit my backpack. So I was prepared for their second attack, moved around like Chuck Norris and hit the second one with a kick before he could react. He went down and I quickly moved on to reach the office building. All others were chasing, but then I heard them screaming that the cops were coming and they ran away.

I’m not proud of beating someone up, but one has to defend oneself. I have to say that I am really shocked about the circumstances. I gave them no reason to be angry or something, but they still decided that I was some kind of enemy. I am sure that the younger ones did not have any clue what they were yelling and that they were incited by the older one.

I don’t know if there is anything that is worth adding to this story.

The Laptop and Windows Vista

Just had to break the line of unimportant updates. Finally, after years (ok, actually months…well hmm…weeks) of waiting, my new laptop has just arrived. The first time ever that I decided to get a Dell. The model is a XPS m1330 that has decent power (Core 2 Duo T7500, 2GB RAM, nVidia 8400M GS graphics card, white LED display,…). The hardware, in my opinion, is really ok, but it kinda sucks that Dell does not offer the XPS models with Linux. They all come with Windows Vista. So this is the first long-time experiment that I’m trying to make friends with the new operating system by Microsoft.

The very first thing I did after completing the installation of Vista was that I disabled all these annoying effects – I really hate those. m1330

What I need is a clean interface to work, not hundreds of fancy widgets wasting space, power and my time (that means that I have to wait for the oh-that-is-so-awesome effect to complete its animation).

I find it kinda funny that when an application crashes, Windows proudly presents a dialog that says that the application crashed and it’s looking for a solution, with a loading bar that keeps proceeding and never results in anything. At least in all my cases it didn’t. Nearly all of the crashes were caused by the Windows explorer itself.

So after disabling all the effects and Aero stuff, I installed Waterstorm which turned out to work as expected, fortunately. A thing I really got angry about was the wifi connection. It happens a lot that I send the laptop to sleep (hibernate) and then wake it up again at some other location where another wireless network is available. It takes minutes of frustration until Windows is able to really use the new connection, although it says it’s connected within a few seconds.

It seems that I have to wait for the next patch day – there may be hope. Ah, one weird thing left. The laptop has a fingerprint sensor that you use for logging into the system (btw, when registering my fingerprints, I thought of some guys at the CIA or somewhere that I really made happy with my decision). However, I’m faster at typing my password to log in than the sensor is able to recognize my finger correctly. I’m so glad that it can be used as a scrolling device, too…