Saturday, October 27, 2007

RMA my RAM (with no mar on my arm)

My laptop started acting wonky. Specifically, it started to spontaneously restart whenever the computer had been running for, say, 40 seconds. That is quite annoying. After doing a little research online, I figured that I had a bad capacitor. After ripping apart my laptop to look around, I realized that a laptop motherboard doesn't have the kind of capacitors discussed as being part of the capacitor plague. After looking around some more, I became convinced that I probably had a bunk RAM stick. If your computer is spontaneously restarting, you might want to suspect a CPU overheating problem or power supply issue or bad driver problem if the restart happens after more than a few minutes, but should suspect bad RAM if the restart can happen very quickly (sometimes during boot) or still happens when your doing something like checking BIOS. As I was investigating the problem on my laptop I had tried to get into the BIOS and the computer froze (didn't restart because that is a Windows response to the bad RAM) and that was the last clue to me that the RAM was at fault.

I had bought a 1GB stick from Newegg.com (which I highly recommend for all computer component shopping) a little over a year ago. I was able to pull up the old invoice on my Gigaram RAM. I went to the Gigaram website and found their RMA (returned merchandise authorization) policy and followed it. After about 3 weeks total, I had my replacement RAM at only the cost of shipping my broken RAM to them. Could have been faster, but having the lifetime warranty honored was a good feeling. The fact that Newegg kept a copy of my invoice avaialable to me and that Gigaram honored the warranty made this a fairly painless experience. Thanks Gigaram and Newegg.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

More than fair

Saw this in an AP story about Lance Briggs pleading guilty to something:

Defense attorney Frank Himel said he was pleased with the outcome.

"The judge was more than fair, more than fair," Himel said.

I guess my question is: if you are more than fair, aren't you clearly being unfair somewhere? If we decide to split a cookie evenly and I take 60% of if, I was totally more than fair. I guess this comes down to zero-sum games versus not, but I think it is still a silly statement.