Our Computer Fixed Yay!

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Today, our laptop was fixed. A wonderful man named Vinnie V. came to our apartment and all was right with the world.

Today, our laptop was fixed. A wonderful man named Vinnie V. came to our apartment and all was right with the world.

It was a bit different Monday night. We were settling in for a lil’ round of Counterstrike when something strange happened to our Dell XPS Inspiron. The screen froze and white dots flashed all over it. We restarted and tried again, same thing. We restarted and booted up Oblivion. The game froze repeatedly, went purple, then the HUD was visible on a field of brown with a diagonal field of purple and green flashing dots. Pretty trippy.

We called Dell Tech Support and went through all of Justin’s tests. He was pretty nice but after 45 minutes, it was pretty obvious our video card was fried. The screen would go black in Windows and we couldn’t function normally, let alone secure the blue power node…

Read more after this jump…

Luckily, when we built the computer online we had, in a moment of safety-conscious whimsy, opted for the on-site warranty. Which meant that Justin was dispatching a man with a new video card to come to our apartment and replace it. Sweet. But we still had to wait a little bit. Perhaps, even till Friday. Bitter.

Somehow we slogged through blogging yesterday on a different computer, our girlfriend’s MacBook. Nice piece of machinery. Not as nice without all our programs and shortcuts. Plus, we really need a big screen. BIG. But we see how all those gloopy icons and smoothness are pretty appealing.

Justin’s tech called us yesterday to see how late they could push the appointment. “I’m a blogger! I need this as soon as you can get it done! The world must be consumed!” He seemed to understand.

Today, Vinnie calls us up to let us know he’ll be coming over sometime today. All in all, we received about five phone calls as he variously told us he was getting the part, had the part, would be calling us later to schedule a time and then scheduled a time and then let us know he was 15 minutes away.

Vinnie arrived, was friendly and personable and got down to work. We found out that Dell was actually going to upgrade our video card, from an NVIDIA 6800 to a 7800. Score. Vinnie finished up, ran a few tests, and played some Half-Life to make sure everything kept running smooth.

And now, we have our fully functional laptop with upgraded video card, two nights after placing the tech support call.

Thank you Dell and thank you Vinnie. If you’re in the New York area and need a service tech nights, weekends, in your home or office, drop him a line at vexmaster@earthlink.net

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