Out of Gurantee Expiry Chip

I’ve often thought that there was some sort of chip installed inside electrical equipment that would cause them to start failing once the guarantee has expired. True to form my PC has just expired and the graphics card fan bearings are seriously screwed up. To come to this conclusion I did first try to blow out the system with compressed air purchased from PC World today. My Dad thinks it is really funny that a can of air is a tenner a shot. I suppose it is really. I’ve seen air for sale from mountain tops on e-bay, though I don’t think polluted city air with a faint smell of chips wafting over from the take away down the road is not going to be so much of an attractive option.

I have my PC on the desk with its side panel off as the air circulation is enough to cool the system so that the graphics card fan does not to spin and therefore make so much noise. The noise of the thing is incredible, almost as noisy as my old Linux box whose called “wardrobe” for no reason other than its the item of furniture immediately seen to my left. Wardrobe is an old girl dating way back and still going strong. Virtually every piece of wardrobe other than the motherboard has been replaced mind you so I guess technically most of her is not really that old after all. Hmmm..

Its most likely that eventually I will have to buy another graphics card for Dell, but I’m not in any rush for that as I’m not a game player that needs a really flash card. I’m not buying yet mainly because I know there’s a dodgy batch of nvidia cards out there and I don’t want one of them. I don’t want to buy an ATI one because this often means many flavours of Linux will not work properly incase in the future I decide I want to put Ubuntu or similar on Dell. I like to buy cards with future upgradability in mind rather than buying something that will just work for windows based operating systems alone – That will be crap forward planning I think!