Problematic PC's

I was always all about PC's. Ever since I was little, playing shareware games on my dad's IBM 386 computer where he first had to teach me to use DOS so I could use it by myself. The school computers were Macs, and I couldn't stand them. None of the games we played were cool, just learning games, and the games I wanted to play couldn't be loaded onto them because they weren't compatible. Fast forward almost 20 years and I buy a new laptop from a custom PC building company after finally deciding I could use an upgrade. See, I built my old computer myself, about 6 years ago, for less about 600 bucks, and while I did upgrade the video card and RAM about halfway through its life, I could still run most of the high end games on it up until then, just not with the high-res graphics settings. I never had many problems with it, no crashes, hard drives never went bad, except sometimes the motherboard would reset and underclock the processor, but that was easily fixed.

Along comes my brand new laptop and I'm excited. I got Windows Vista on it because it's the new thing and I don't see any reason to get XP when it will be outdated soon. I load up my games on it and start one up, and I'm amazed at how great they look now. Vista is cool, has lots of functions that are new and fun to use, but for some reason even though my processor is faster and I have more than twice the RAM of my old computer, it takes forever for the thing to boot up. Not only that, but every time you want to install something you have to confirm that yes, in fact, you do want to install it like 3 times. It just seems like overkill to have all this stuff added on to the operating system when it's just gonna slow it down. The main reason you buy a new computer is because it's supposed to be faster than your previous one, but that wasn't really the case. Luckily it ran all my games way more smoothly and I just had to remember to boot it up, do something else for a few minutes, then come back when it's ready.

Then the problems started up. The computer would freeze up and I'd have to do a hard shut down, or it would shut itself down for no apparent reason. Sometimes I would start it up and the screen wouldn't come on, but I also couldn't hold the power button down to do a hard shut down so I'd have to unplug it and take the battery out to get it to turn off. I don't really know what to blame these things on, but last week my hard drive died. Just completely died. I started it up and it couldn't read the hard drive, so I thought maybe Vista had crashed and I just needed to do a system restore. Got out my system restore disk that came with the computer and went through the process, only to find my hard drive had nothing on it anymore. Pretty annoying since that meant I lost all my music, but nothing on there I can't replace, so I just told it to reinstall Windows and I'd start again from a clean slate. Halfway through installation though it stops and tells me it can't find the installation sources. That's not a good sign, but it tells me to restart the installation so I do, with the same results, and I continue a few more times before I give up and call tech support.

See, I ordered from a smaller computer builder company because most of the big PC manufacturers are way more expensive because they throw a bunch of useless software in with each computer to make it cost more, plus they don't close to as many customization options. The problem with that is the small companies don't have much in the way of tech support. On their website it says they provide 24/7 service, but I can't imagine them having more than a couple guys sitting there answering phones in between fixing other computers. This led to me calling 3 or 4 times a day for 4 days, getting put on hold for 15-30 minutes at a time and basically getting frustrated at the fact that all I needed was a few minutes to explain the situation and for them to send me a new hard drive to replace my bad one. Finally on Sunday I made it through and he told me I should have a new hard drive by the end of the week, which would be great if that happens, but with the holiday I'm not sure it will. At least for now I can at least rest easy knowing I'm not stuck with this problem and unable to do anything about it. I still don't know if Vista caused the crash or if the hard drive was slowly dying already and finally decided to kick the bucket, it did seem that the unannounce shutdowns were coming more frequently the past month or so though. Needless to say I will be backing up all my files to an external hard drive from now on though.

The moral of this story? I don't really know, but for me I guess it was that the computer you build on your own will cause less problems than one built by someone else.