Tyrone

Tyrone

A couple of years ago my boys built themselves a couple of Hackintoshs. Then they ran off and joined the circus and left us with their monster machines. While the guts were identical, cases were not. Naturally I got the spiffy little aluminum cube and my wife got the big black behemoth. A couple of weeks ago mine died. No sound, so smoke, no indications of impending doom, just the sudden disappearance of the video signal. Tried a different display and when that didn't work, I concluded that the motherboard had died so I ordered a replacement from Amazon.
    Then I got to thinking that maybe I could send it back to Gigabyte and they could fix it. When I look into this possibility I found that the board was still under warranty. Well, cool. But if I am going to send the board back to the factory, I should probably make sure it's really dead. You know, maybe it's not the motherboard at all, maybe it's the power supply. Yes, the fan is still running, but there are like 16 voltages coming out of a power supply and just because one wire is working, it doesn't mean any of the others are.
    So I pull the power supply out of my wife's machine (identical guts, remember? And her machine is working fine), plug it into mine, but it doesn't help. Plug my power supply into her system and it works fine. So it's not the power supply.
    Remeber you know how I told you she has the big black behemoth case? Working on it is a major pain. Most of the space inside is taken up with a rack for hard disks. There are like five slots for 3.5" inch drives, but they are all empty. The machine is running off one little laptop drive stuck in the bottom of the case. Who needs a system with five hard drives anyway? I suppose you could do some kind of RAID thing, and it you were a server that might come in handy. I dunno maybe if you were running some kind of fancy game or working with 4K video all that space might come in handy. You would really have to be dedicated to whatever it was to make the expense and effort worthwhile.
    In any case, it looks like the motherboard from my system is truly broken, but it's covered by warranty, so I don't need the board I ordered from Amazon, so I pack them both up in boxes. Now they need shipping labels. When I go to Amazon I am told I can drop my package off with Tyrone, who is hanging out at the local Kwiky Mart (aka Plaid Pantry). Well, that's news to me. I stop off there regularly and I've never seen anything that looked like an Amazon locker. But I drive over there this morning, and sure enough, there he is, bigger 'en Dallas. The nice lady behind the counter tells me he's been there for five months. I've been in there at least a dozen times and I never noticed him.