Dell: Less Painful Than Expected

I finally opened a service call with Dell regarding the suspected bad motherboard in my hard-drive-killing laptop. As I expected, they initially suggested I do all of the things that I'd already done, like trying the "bad" drives in another computer, or cloning a different disk image. They also suggested doing a complete reinstallation from scratch, which I really didn't want to do because from all of the other tests done, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time.

Somewhat to my surprise, they agreed to replace the motherboard, and I should be hearing from a service technician in a few days. I'll probably have to do an installation-from-scratch after that, but I won't feel so bad about doing so then because it seems far less likely that the computer will simply eat the hard drive thereafter.

RIP: Charles N. Brown

As first seen on coppervale's LJ, the editor/publisher of Locus, Charles N. Brown, has died.