For those that have read A Week With Windows, this is the companion piece that covers my non-Windows grievances during my week off. It, too, also intended as therapy, and to seek solace, comfort, and sympathy. But I don't expect I'll get any!
The most annoying hardware problem involved my monitors. Specifically, my main Windows monitor, which was intermittently switching itself off all week, only to die in an insipid whimper on Friday. With no spares, no transport, and no time to get a new one delivered before I returned to work, I was forced to move the 19" CRT from my Linux box to the Windows machine. Although my headless Linux machine is still useable (thanks to Cygwin, putty, and a X Window Server) it's not the same. If there's a bad time for hardware to die, it will make the most of that opportunity.
My laptop screen was also playing up throughout the week. But in truth, it's been a bit dicky for the last couple of months.
My new phone should have been my pride and joy, after my old phone kept cutting conversations in half, but it wasn't. To begin, it refused to accept my sim card. No reason for this was found, but repeatedly removing and re-inserting it, it eventually allowed me to login. Being one of the new Walkman phones, I wanted to test its music capabilities, so I plugged in my lovely Sennheiser's and... watched the phone hang. This is a temperamental bug, with no obvious repro steps.
After music, came video. Or not, as the case may be, since I couldn't view any video placed on the memory stick of my phone. This is annoying because, as you can guess, the memory stick had 256 MB free, and the internal memory had about 17 KB. So that feature's worthless! Who designs this stuff?
The next piece of technology to break was my X10 remote control. This lets me control my lights from the comfort of my bed. Plus, with the aid of some software running on my (Linux) server, control the song and playback volume of my MP3 jukebox. I even bought some replacement batteries, but to no avail, so it's a formally broken unit. Plus, since this isn't the most common of appliances, I have had to order on-line. It's taken a week to arrive, but I have now received a replacement... which doesn't work in the evenings, for some reason. You forget how much these little pieces of technology add to the enjoyment of ones automated house, and how much they're missed when they don't work.
One final problem was the slug; aka the NSLU2 that I use as a fileserver. I'd bought a new drive to spread the load, and opted for a 400 gig beastie from my local supplier. This required the NTFS modules to be loaded. Despite the apparent belief they worked and were stable, I found them to be otherwise. They hung the machine with disturbing regularity, and crashed the Windows clients that were connected to them. I consequently unloaded all the drivers, and reformatted it to FAT32 using Partition Magic, since Windows is crippled and doesn't support such large disc partitions.
Apart from that, the slug has operated flawlessly for the last month, although a power cut on Monday meant I'd got a broken FAT on one of the other drives. Not that I realized it at the time. And only when Windows rebooted itself, and corrupted my disc, did I realize there were bigger problems.
I am in the process of checking the entire disc set, and wondering whether I can afford to buy another hard disc. Perhaps it's just me, but hardware is just too flakey.