AMD Athlon64 3000+

My PC, a 2006 purchase, with AMD Athlon64 3000+, Asus SLI motherboard(aka mobo), and Geforce 6600GT, has had its 'unfair' share of problems.

Back when I bought it, I was already made to wait for 1 month plus for the Asus board to arrive at Stygix.

Then, after a few months using it, the mobo's fan malfunctioned, where it refused to cool my mobo.

I sent it for warranty, which took 3 months plus(!) before I get the the replacement However, the new unit's fan also died after just one month plus. :|

Refusing to wait another 3 months, I decided to use it without the fan, and thankfully, the PC met no problems without it.

Around the stat of 2007, my beloved 19" AOC Flatscreen monitor, which served me faithfully since the last year of my undergraduate(circa 2001-2), began to show signs of its age.

The displayed screen shrunk from 19" to only around 8-10".

As such, I changed to the Viewsonic VA1912WB LCD monitor, which was fine until 3 months later, where the its power unit went on strike.

Since I bought it from PC World over here, I sent it for warranty thinking that I would get it back a few weeks from then.

However, 2 months passed, and there was no news from them. One day I went over to see Steven, and checked with him about the status of my monitor.

Steven made a few calls, and promised me that my LCD would be back soon. Anyway, a week passed, and again there is still no news of my LCD.

This proved to be the start of my countless trips to the shop to ask about the LCD. Each time, Steven's technician would help me to call to the supplier to inquire about the LCD, and each of the call would end with "it would be back soon".

Noticing my frequency of visits, Steven then decided to make a full inquiry into the LCD, and found that all along, my LCD was already fixed, but it 'disappeared'.

The disappearance was due to that back when I sent my LCD for warranty, it was sent to the supplier, which subsequently did not sell Viewsonic monitors anymore, and passed its operation to a second supplier.

As such, this second supplier, which the PC World's technician called, did not know about my LCD at all, and thought it was lost or something.

Anyway, at the end of the 4th month, I finally got my LCD monitor back, albeit with a few scratches here and there.

My latest problem with my PC is the Geforce 6600GT. The fan(again) of the GPU had malfunctioned. When I opened it, I found that the fan's base had melted.

Anyway, since I had 4 fans for the casing, I took 1 off, and placed it directly below the heatsink of the GPU.

Thankfully, my PC ran without a problem for the past month.

That is, until now.

Yesterday, just after I had transferred my research work to the thumbdrive, the PC suddenly rebooted.

My first thought was that it was the GPU overheating, but to my dismay, Windows XP would not boot. It would continue displaying the Windows XP booting screen with the progress bar running, for hours.

In fact, I powered it up - hoping that it would boot normally - before I went to sleep (around 12.30am) yesterday.

I was awoken around 5am just now when I heard the main door being opened, and some loud laughter followed by sounds of "shhhhh".

The status of my Windows?

Still loading.

I have tried Safe Mode, System Restore and Chkdsk, but it still failed.

I am running a final chkdsk, and if it still fails to load, looks like I will need a reformat.

ZZZZZZ.

'Patient' uncle

I just finished lunch with Maureen, and on the way back, I went to fill up our 3 bottles with the reverse osmosis (RO) water at the vending machine in front of Hup Heng.

It's cheaper than the others right now, with 10cents for 1.5 liters of water.

When I reached there, a Malay, mustached uncle was filling up water with around 8 bottles of 1.5-liter bottles.

He told me, "I still have a lot of bottles, you better use the other machines" in a slightly unpleasant manner.

"OK, I only have 3 bottles..." I said, wanting to continue with "can you let me use it first?", but he was not listening and went towards his car to fetch another 4 bottles.

All right, I am patient, I can wait for him to fill up his 30-40 bottles, since he didn't had the courtesy to let me fill up my bottles in less than 3 minutes.

So, he went to and fro from his car to the water vending machine, carrying 4 bottles each time, with each trip taking around 30 secs.

It took him around 15-20 minutes to finished filling all the bottles. (I didn't bother to calculate, since he arrived there, he did had the priority to use the machine)

Now, once he has filled up the last bottles, he went back to his car to put his bottles, with another 3 filled-up bottles left on the machine.

Since he was walking to his car, I went up and filled up my 2-liter bottle, expecting it to finish just about the time the uncle came back.

He came back for the bottles, and I was still maintaining my good mood even though I was slightly irritated by the lack of courtesy of the uncle at that time (imagine waiting for 20 mins for a 3-mins task).

However, the words that came out of the uncle were really out of my expectations.

"Be patient lah. Wait and be patient."

WTH?

I was already being patient for him to walk to his car and fill up his bottles for 20 mins, and now that he's not using the machine, I can't even fill up until he has finished taking the last 3 bottles?

Come on, he is the one with no patience to wait for me to fill up just half a bottle of water!

If he had patience, he would have let me fill up my 3 bottles in 3 mins, but instead made me wait for 20 mins!

And he even had the nerve to come out with words like this.

Pure classic.