Previous News07.14.2011 - Terrence Marks:On Saturday, Isabel's computer stopped working. I'm a computer technician. I realize that "not working" is a symptom, not a diagnosis. It had HDD lights, no video (on multiple monitors), no beeps, and no keyboard lights. It was probably the motherboard, with a slight chance of it being a power supply issue.
Was the hard drive intact? We couldn't tell then. The computer was failing at POST, before it even accessed the drives. We had no reason to believe it was damaged, but we had no way of knowing.
It could've come at a better time - when we weren't working on comics or when I wasn't at work, for instance - but we had been talking about replacing the computer. We've had it for seven years. Human years, that is. That's eighty in computer years. I'm not sure we could've bought replacement parts even if we wanted to. And we didn't, since we needed to get it back up and running to get comics done.
I spent my lunch hour trying to figure out what to buy. As I've mentioned before, computer shopping isn't easy. You've got a lot of choices, and understanding what the numbers actually mean is only a little helpful. You might know that one processor can deliver more frames per second when render 3D video, but would that translate into actually working faster at the things we need to do? Or would it not make a difference because RAM is what's really slowing you down?
After half an hour, I realized I wasn't so much looking for new information as trying to get the internet to validate my choices. The computer I was looking at was just as good as the other computers I was looking at, or close enough to it for our purposes.
When I got home, I managed to set that computer up. I got Isabel's old hard drive installed in my computer. The data was still intact. We got everything copied over to her new computer. We're still working on getting things set up and getting all the programs installed, but everything seems to be back to mostly working. It's just taking her a while to adjust to the changes and set things up, and comics are going to be a bit late today.
You Say it First: Favorite Minor Character (not Lemon Tech. Division)
Emily Jake Jane Marla Dalton Lola The Lounge Guys
Lola seems to be a clear winner here, with Jane, Marla, and The Lounge Guys making a respectable showing. I need to set up one of these brackets for Namir Deiter soon.