About 2 weeks ago I lost my raid controller somewhat randomly. Everything was fine, shut computer down, next boot up, get a weird graphical glitch instead of the raid post screen. Of course it needs to post to be seen by the computer, so thats it, its basically dead. Just to be sure, I tried on two other motherboards, and its not posting on them either. I checked the warranty, and I was in luck, 3 years! Was well within that, and ebuyer seemed very quick with the RMA process at the start, reported on wednesday, picked up for collection on thursday (unlike scan who usually make you post out of your own pocket), so got there on friday, and on monday they confirmed it was faulty and would be replaced. Thats where things stopped moving so nicely. I noted the product wasnt in stock. Given its not exactly the most popular item, I thought i would send an email asking when they might be able to get some stock/ source a replacement for me. The 'ive emailed the product manager to find out' response can on tuesday, so I waited for that. By today I got a little bit tetchy with the lack of a response. I decided to have another look at the product to see if that would shed some light. ****! They had changed the stock message from "out of stock" to "Sorry, this product is currently unavailable. It is likely that it has been discontinued and no longer for sale." I thought I should send another polite 'enote' telling them I had noticed the product description had changed and wondered if they could maybe update me on the situation. Got told 'we wont get any more in, please choose an alternative product and we will just charge you the difference if it costs more". Now, given its a hardware raid 5 controller, it seemed a little bit of a silly response to me. Its not like I could just plug in any random raid controller and it would pick up my array. I had a quick look around anyway, and they didnt have anything even remotely close to similar to the card I bought (in fact about 4 of the 7 pages of 'raid controllers' they list all show as end of line/discontinued). Sent another enote telling them politely that theres really nothing other product that would work, it needs to be that particular raid controller. Response is a disappointing "I will submit a refund request for you. Please be mindful that this will be of proportionate vale, based upon the age of the goods." Im not sure exactly how much Im going to get back, but the point is I didnt even want a refund, I just wanted a replacement, or a repair. On top of that the card now costs at least £30 more than I paid ~2 years ago. Second hardware woe: A couple of days ago the usb started to go on my emu 0404 usb. The spdif still works perfectly, but its clear the usb is on its way out, ive tried different usb cables and tried it on the other systems. For this one Im probably just going to keep the thing its in slightly crippled state, its well past warranty, had it either 5 or 6 years now. Third hardware woe: Not strictly a hardware woe, but my graphics card. its a hd5850. In november the fan started to make noises it shouldnt be making (sounded like when theres a fan cable in the way, only there was nothing blocking it). I decided that because I had had it less than a year, it would be worth getting it fixed via RMA. I will tell you know, the XFX RMA process is just convoluted beyond any reasonable reason. I have a feeling its put in place just to prevent as many people using it as they can get away with. Eventually got through all the hoops, and got it sent off. Scan said they tested the card and noticed the fault. They sent it off to XFX. A week or two later, I get told "XFX have tested to find no fault with your card"..... Thankfully, in the same email scan massaged my fears by telling me they probably had repaired the problem with the cooler. So I waited to get the card back. Now, between scan, xfx and the christmas period it was over 2 months that the card had been away. Thats a long time to be stuck back on the old 7900 GTX you had left over. You can imagine my frustration when within 2 minutes of the pc being back on I hear the "BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ" noise which confimed XFX had done absolutely nothing about. I decided to take the card out and have a poke around, given the supposed warranty I had was worse than useless. Except I didnt even need to. Within 10 seconds of holding the card I realised the problem happened when the blower was facing down, aka the position its in all traditional tower cases. The blower didnt make the banshee noises when it was perpendicular to the floor, or desktop cases and most importantly, all test rigs. The knowledge of the problem didnt really help me solve it. i tried taking it apart and putting it together again, tightening the screws, loosening them, etc. Didnt work, the fan would make a noise when it was in my case. So I decided just to go and buy an accelero twin turbo, and forget about trying to re-rma the thing, and lose it for another god knows how long to get it back not fixed again. Btw, the accelero heatsinks are ****ing ace. I had an accelero S1 on my 8800GTS, it was fantastic (and I would have been able to use it had my brother not sold the card ). The twin turbo is also fantastic. It was worth the money to upgrade even if the stock cooler was working perfectly fine. The slightly non-hardware related part are the ****ing ATI drivers. They have given me evil nightmares. Specifically their UVD powerplay settings, (no.2 in this thread, btw: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1559534&highlight=uvd ). I watch tv on my PC via a tv card, and I could make the ati driver crash every single time if I opened a youtube video while the tv was playing in media center. I made sure it was an ATI problem, had a brand new windows install, no video codecs installed whatsoever, standard ati drivers installed, no overclock, got the display driver crash again and again. So I had to flash my vbios just to have a stable graphics card while watching the box. To me, thats ****ing abysmal to expect a end user to have to do to get something working on a very very basic task. Lastly, I think my blu-ray drive is also on the way out. Its started making an awful racket on some DVD's, refusing to read them, and even becoming disconnected from the mobo (as in, it disappears until you 'scan for hardware changes' in device manager). Very lastly, I just tried installing the bluetooth drivers for this new mobo. I didnt really need them, but it showing as not installed on device manager bugged me a little. http://i.imgur.com/749rS.png Windows, what the hell? There were literally 30+ windows of that notice, I never thought they were going to stop popping up! Was like being back in the days of windows 95. In summary: ebuyer, you suck. scan, you suck. XFX, you suck. AMD, you suck. Intel, you suck. emu/creative, you suck. Microsoft, you suck. Pioneer, you probably suck but I havent got round to confirming it yet.
Okay: Ouch. I just ran smack bang into ye old "I cleaned it, then it never worked again" problem. About four weeks back now, I pulled apart my system to clean it out after I noticed development of carpet monsters in the CPU heatsink. Cleaned it all out, as always, cleaned off all the old thermal paste, new application, so on and so forth. Whole lot done pretty carefully, I know modern components are relatively sturdy, but I won't exactly chuck parts about willy-nilly. Anyway, trundled along, put it all back together after i'd removed a few CM^3 of dust, started it up, and got nothing. Whole system happily purred away, apart from an absolute lack of Post noises, video and sound output. Crap. So I tried everything from there, inspected the board, bought a new frikkin' Bios Chip, none of it worked. So I have £90 to my name and need a new motherboard. So I get a spare one of my mate, itt suffers the exact same problems. Despite being Intel, rather than AMD. Raeg. Cutting it even shorter: I now won't get any birthday presents ( So no driving lessons when I hit 17.) because the £300 needed to upgrade from AM2 to AM3 (And by extention, DDR2 - DDR3) cut all of that out of the way. Damn. End result: I have a Phenom II X4 B55, and a new PSU because I suspect that had started nuking all of the Motherboards. Best raeg evar from being in the midst of a Brutally quick College Course, equal to Three A levels and not having a machine to do any work on, however. On the flip side: Performance in everything has shot up skyhigh, so it's not the end of the world. Yet.
