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A Series of Unfortunate Events

I'm currently having the fortnight from hell with regards to all things technological. First, I started having some serious issues with my 3G Internet dongle. As I couldn't get the modem that came with the package (a Huawei E122) to work with Linux, I was forced to use an older E220. That was fine until I started getting disconnected, a lot. Also, some of the websites that I wanted to visit suddenly were no longer working. I narrowed that particular issue down to particular files that would no longer load through the Three connection. It wasn't a particular file type that was being blocked, in-fact it was even screwing with some of my own CSS files for a site I was working on! Countless phone calls to them ended with no resolution to the actual problem, other than them saying it must be a Linux problem, and that they don't support that OS. That would have been possibly understandable, if I wasn't having the exact same issue on more than one computer using Linux (why would the OS be blocking particular files anyway?) and even when I plugged it into a Windows machine.

Another phone call, and this time I'm told to upgrade the modem to the one supplied to me, as they can't support the older one I was using. I switched to that temporarily for the duration of the call, for them to then admit that there was an issue on their system, and that upgrade work was going on in the area, which would last another month. Can you try the modem on your computer but in a different area? I was asked. Aside from the technical difficulties of moving a desktop machine somewhere just to humor them, I didn't see what this would actually solve, as I was using the modem at home, and that was where my problem was!

The next problem I ran into was with my graphics card. It was only an old NVidia card, but for some reason it was now having some serious memory allocation difficulties, to the point where I was only able to get about 10 consecutive minutes of gameplay on WoW before it crashed out. At first I thought it might have been an issue with Wine because the message was a little vague, but booting up into Windows gave the same problem, just with more details. Upgrading the graphics drivers did nothing to solve the issue, and as the problem had suddenly occurred, on two operating systems, I concluded it to be a hardware issue. I bit the bullet and bought a new graphics card, and could appreciate my games a lot more with the higher graphics settings that were suddenly available to me.

My joy didn't last long though, as a few days later while I pulled out my Three dongle from the computer, the front USB on the case (which was already a little wobbly) came loose and shorted, and in a freak of perfect conditions killed my motherboard stone dead. I spent all night swapping components in and out of the machine to determine exactly what went wrong, and when I realised, I knew there was only one answer: a new board.

The board I settled for was part of a bundle:

• ECS 8100VM-M5 Motherboard
• AMD Triple-Core Phenom 1900MHz
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• Nvidia Inno3D 512MB graphics card

I was able to salvage the 1GB of RAM from my old board, and all the hard drives, and the machine now absolutely flies along. However, it wasn't all smooth sailing. You see, both Windows and Linux were having some major problems with the new board because the chipset of the board had changed. I think I might have been able to get away with such a drastic hardware change if I'd kept to the same chipset family, but it wasn't going to play ball without a total rebuild. That, though, is a tale for another day (mostly because it stretches on a bit!)