Month: January 2007

In my continuing monitor saga, I needed to order two more monitors – earlier in the evening I checked Dell.ca and confirmed that they were still being offered for $699 CAD. At 10:17pm last night, after trying to get that pixel un-stuck and packing up the two defective monitors, I went to order two more. Guess what? The price had jumped back up to $899 CAD! I actually burst out laughing, because it was so comical that after all my efforts that night to salvage one more of the three monitors, I was rewarded with a price jump. It turns out the Dell Web site is on Eastern time (I should have known that, Ontario being the center of the universe in Canada after all) – so 10:17pm my local time was 12:17am Dell time, and the $200 discount was over. Of course, I won’t be defeated that easily! This morning I called Dell to arrange the return of the two defective units – zero hassle. Dell is really great about accepting things back when you’re within those first 15 days. Then I called Dell Online Sales, which is their call centre in India. I spoke to a fell named Abdul, who listened to the basic story (nine monitors ordered in five months, only one good one found) and said he would review my case and phone me back. So I sit here, waiting, hoping that Dell Online Sales will have mercy on me, a poor fool who didn’t realize that on Dell’s Canadian Web site, when it hits midnight at their headquarters in Ontario, that’s the end of the day all across Canada. 😉 I’ll update this after I hear back. Even if Abdul says no, I’ll ask to speak to his manager and continue escalating this.

And for those that are wondering why I haven’t just gone elsewhere for my monitors, the main reason is that I like Dell monitors. I have four Dell monitors in my house now, and with the exception of this ridiculous experience, I’ve had really good results from Dell with their monitors. The $699 price point is also tough to beat – at my local computer store they only have one other 24″ monitor that’s close in price, an Acer that’s $799 CAD. The BenQ is $869 CAD. So for $699, these monitors are impossible to beat. Lastly, at this point my desire to get three perfect Dell 2407WFP’s has attained the status of a holy quest – it’s just something I have to do. And the cynical side of me wants to see how many monitors I have to go through to get three of them that are flawless.

UPDATE: After waiting four hours, I decided to call Abdul back. Turns out he was busy with incoming calls, and when they have a lot of incoming calls, they’re not supposed to call people back. A bit strange. At any rate, he honoured the price of $699 per monitor, I just had to also pay $15 in shipping per monitor. Not a big deal – I’ll pay $15 to learn my lesson of ordering things the second I think I should. Now I wait and see if, when the two monitors show up, they’re actually any better than the others. Come on lucky #10 and #11!

Today I received two packages: one was a couriered bottle of wine from my friends at Vaja (that’s a twist tie stopping it from rolling off my desk if you’re curious). Yes, they really are that friendly – they sponsor contests for us all the time, give us anything we want for review, and are amazingly supportive partners all around. And as a Happy New Year gift, they sent me some wine. This particular swag will be opened and consumed at a dinner with friends.

Next we have something on the other end of the scale: it’s not food related, and it’s all gadget goodness. This is a T-Mobile Dash from a press release event that Janak Parekh went to in New York – I was invited, but I wasn’t about to fly down for one event, so Janak went instead. They gave him a Dash to keep, but he didn’t want to use it and switch back to GSM, so he reviewed it for Smartphone Thoughts then sent it to me. Janak doesn’t like lines, so it took him a couple of months to get it in the mail to me. 😉 But now that I have it, I’m pretty excited because I haven’t used one extensively before – and it’s also my first Smartphone with a keyboard (that’s right, I’ve never owned a Motorola Q, Samsung i320, etc.). It’s SIM-locked to T-Mobile’s network though, so I have to get it unlocked – and all before Friday night when I leave for CES.

My heart is pounding, my throat is dry, my palms are sweaty…no, I’m not looking at one of those Web sites. I’m setting up and testing out the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors that showed up today. For those keeping score, I just went through this last week, so I’m feeling a bit pessimistic about whether or not this is going to work out. Drummer, start that drum roll…

• Monitor 1: Ashley unpacked the box, no missing parts, looks like it’s brand new. No cracked LCD. Plugged it in over VGA (connected to the Fujitsu 17″ laptop). Ran the colour gradient test, no banding – sweet. Ran it through the solid colours…what’s that speck? Augh! NO! Wait…oh, it’s a piece of dust. Checks monitor, nearly blind now from examining it so closely. 100% perfect – no dead or stuck pixels. We have a winner!
• Monitor 2: Looks ok coming out of the box, hooked it up…display comes up. Looking good so far. Fire up the gradient test….AUGH! Stuck pixel in the bottom right corner. Damn damn damn. Fire up Jscreenfix and run it by placing the pop-up window under the dead pixel – not sure if this is an elaborate hoax or prank (I’ve never seen these things be successful before), but it can’t hurt to try. Play with the positions on the monitor a bit while it’s Jscreenfix’n (reminds me of Rubberneckin’), monitor goes down to lowest position, snaps into place – now can’t get it back up. Button on back of monitor is supposed to release it to move up, it’s locked. Press harder. It’s locked. Move monitor down a little more, button releases, monitor is free to move again. Still Jscreenfix’n. [leaves it for 60 minutes] Jscreenfix didn’t do a damn thing, like I thought. Maybe there’s some real science behind it, but it didn’t work for me. Curses.
• Monitor 3: Unpacking it, the monitor looks new, not a re-pack. Good stuff. Hook it all up, power it on. No obvious dead pixels – wait, what’s that in the bottom left corner? It’s a…scratch? It’s not on the upper layer of the monitor, it’s on a layer beneath, so it looks like the actual LCD is damaged. I didn’t even think LCDs could scratch. Well, whatever it is, it’s huge and nasty and not staying in my office.

So there you have it folks: one out of three monitors is good, the other two are going back. Now it doesn’t seem so crazy that I ordered three monitors in three separate orders, does it? For those keeping score, I’ve now had nine of the 2407WFP monitors since I first started buying them in August of 2006, and I’ve just now found my first one that is actually worth keeping. This has now reached comical proportions, so I’m going to keep going down this crazy trail. The price is still $699 CAD, so I’ll be ordering two more and returning these two defective monitors. But at least I have one good one – so even in the pixellated darkness, there is hope…(but Dell, your quality control SUCKS).

Given how sensitive some people are in the blogosphere, I thought it might be a fun experiment to keep track of all the swag, review gear, and other assorted sundries that come my way over the next couple of months. It might be enlightening for some people if they saw how much, and what sort of things, come the way of an online reviewer type such as myself.

Above we have a package that appeared out of the blue from AMD – likely related to the Velocity Micro MCE promotion. The bag is quite nice – very high quality, and it stores a laptop vertically, which is one type of bag I actually don’t have (I own around 20 laptop bags/pouches). They also sent along a combo four port USB hub that has an integrated ethernet cable, along with a separate four port travel hub. Both look pretty cheap, but I’ll keep ’em for spares or give them away on Digital Media Thoughts.

I always swore that I’d never use this blog for posting every random lame survey I did (or was asked to do), but being a former comic book geek I felt this was appropriate. How much of a comic book geek am I? On New Years Eve we had three other couples over and we were discussing the trailer for Spiderman 3 and how cool it looked. Someone said that Venom was in it, and I patiently explained (without rolling my eyes even!) that the black “costume” is really an alien symbiote and Venom is created when said symbiote bonds with Eddie Brock, who’s name they dropped in the first Spiderman movie…thus setting up Spiderman 4 for a possible Venom storyline (depending on how Spiderman 3 ends of course). Yes, I’m a coming book geek. So who was I when I took the test?

You are Superman

Superman 95% Green Lantern 75% Spider-Man 75% Iron Man 65% The Flash 65% Hulk 55% Robin 50% Supergirl 50% Batman 50% Catwoman 35% Wonder Woman 30%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Also, through no advance coordination, when my wife Ashley took the test, guess who she was? Supergirl! We’re sooo cool. 😉

They also have super-villain test, which of course I didn’t take because I’m super-hero minded, and Superman after all. Ok, ok, I know my friend Mitch would want me to take the test, so here’s who I am as a super-villain…

You are Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor 80% Dr. Doom 76% Apocalypse 62% The Joker 57% Juggernaut 54% Dark Phoenix 52% Riddler 51% Kingpin 51% Mr. Freeze 50% Magneto 49% Green Goblin 46% Venom 41% Catwoman 20% Two-Face 18% Poison Ivy 18% Mystique 14%

A brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time!

Isn’t it interesting that my “hero” side and my “villain” side are the arch-nemesis of each other? I’m not sure I want to think too hard about what that means… 😉

As the saying goes, when it rains it pours. In the past 45 days, I’ve had one hard drive fail, had a trashed computer show up at my door, and had three defective Dell monitors come my way. Those three things are irritating, but not show-stoppers, because they didn’t impact the technology I currently have in place. Yesterday, something else happened that really made the other things seem insignificant. Sunday afternoon I put in the DVD for Titan’s Quest to play an online game with my friend Tim who’s out in London, Ontario. The game booted up, I created a game, then started checking the game quests since I hadn’t played in a couple of weeks. My cursor suddenly froze and the game locked up – I raised an eyebrow, wiggled the mouse a bit to confirm that it was locked up, then waited. It didn’t un-freeze, so I was thinking a video driver crash. I pressed ALT+F4 to kill the game. Nothing happened. I pressed CONTROL+ALT+DELETE to bring up the Task Manager. Nothing happened. I waited another 30 seconds to see if the CPU was going to acknowledge the keystrokes, then punched the reset button on the Shuttle SD11G5. Nothing happened. At this point my other eyebrow raised, because now I was seeing a hardware malfunction. I press and held the power button – again, nothing. Getting a bit more concerned, I pulled the power cable from the back of the unit. I waited about 10 seconds, plugged it back in, then booted up the machine. I breathed a sigh of relief when the machine booted up, but when I saw that the BIOS boot text was partially purple, I knew something was very wrong.

The only time I’ve seen things like that is when a video card has gone bad, or is about to completely fail. What was even more peculiar though was what I saw when I examined the voltages reported by the motherboard.

I’ve never seen anything like THAT before: 4 degree Celcius CPU temperature? .9 volts on the 12 volt rail? Windows XP would also not boot past the logo screen. I went out to a local store and picked up a cheap eVGA 7300GS PCI Express video card and swapped it out. The video card problem went away – no more purple characters, no more voltage problems. Thrilled, I thought I had solved my problems – I was wrong. I didn’t un-install any drivers, I just put in the new card and booted up the PC. I was working in Windows (it booted up OK) and the machine would lock up. I did this fairly consistently, so I rebooted the machine, un-installed the nVidia drivers, rebooted, and re-installed the newest drivers. Things seemed to be ok, so I left the machine at the Windows XP desktop and went back up to the New Years Eve part we were having at our house. This morning I woke up and when I checked on the machine, I saw this:

Not good. Even worse, when I rebooted the machine it became even more unstable – I couldn’t boot into Windows XP any longer. I started to poke around at the guts of the Shuttle, checking for loose cables and whatnot. I ran memtest86 and it locked up after 5 minutes – but no RAM errors were reported. I swapped out the 2 GB of RAM anyway, replacing it with a single 256 MB stick, and ran the test again. This time it locked up after 20 seconds. At this point, the Shuttle wouldn’t even boot – now when I press the power button all I get is the fan kicking up to full RPM and staying there…and nothing coming up on the screen. I’m thinking a bad power supply possibly, but that’s hard to debug because the SD11G5 uses a custom external power supply that I don’t have a spare of. It could also be a fried motherboard, or even a bad CPU. At this point I’m out of ideas and tomorrow I’ll likely be calling Shuttle – but I’m not sure if the unit is even still under warranty, or if there’s anything cost-effective they could do even if it was. I may build a new machine based on the transplanted parts of this computer, but without being able to test each component first, that may be another disaster waiting to happen.

I sure hope this isn’t an indication of how the rest of my 2007 is going to go with regards to technology! Maybe I should have been a dirt farmer after all…