These are problems of two kinds.
It's bad enough that my laptop is having hard disk troubles again - for the third time! It's a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E7110, a doomed brand since Siemens is terminating its collaboration with Fujitsu. Not surprising, really. It was the hard disk built by Fujitsu that failed only three months after I bought the damn thing. With the hard disk went my dissertation. I had to wait for six weeks until the computer returned from maintenance with a new disk. The second time, a bit more than a year later, it took several hundreds of my photos with it. My fault, I guess - why don't I back this stuff up? I knew the disk was crap but who'd expect the same thing to happen twice? Now I know why Fujitsu Siemens offer a 3-year warranty: With such inferior quality they would get lynched otherwise. This time now, it hasn't actually failed yet. It's just slowing down unbearably. Loading a new application can take minutes, booting the machine takes almost a quarter of an hour. It got to the point where doing anything involving the hard disk became an excercise in patience. Faced with the choice of buying a new laptop or replacing the disk I've finally decided to do the latter. I can't afford to buy a new high-end machine (yet) and I hate compromises in this area. I've decided on a Samsung disk this time. I found it funny that the guy in the computer shop commented they didn't even stock Fujitsu disks. I'm definitely not buying Fujitsu ever again.
The second, more annoying problem regards the TEVION Highspeed HomePlug Internet Adapter-Set PLA 8507, a product sold by Aldi in Germany. The link here is to the Aldi website because Tevion is a brand of cheap quasi-no-name products that don't have their own website - I believe they belong to Medion AG but they don't have the product on their site either. The product consists of two plugs that fit into your normal power sockets and promises Internet and networking connectivity in every room of your home using your home's existing power lines (see diagram). Sounded perfect because my desktop computer is too far away from the router to receive any wireless signal. I ran off to Aldi the day I saw the advert and bough it. That's when troubles started. I plugged the two little buggers in for the first time and waited with expectation. Nothing happened. The little lights on the adapters that indicate a link between the two devices were on but I couldn't get a logical connection through them. This means my desktop computer couldn't "see" the router and, thus, couldn't access the Internet either. I ran around the house for hours trying this and that. Nothing worked. There was no connection. I gave up. The next day I tried again and it worked. I was confused but relieved. The setup hadn't changed ... For about a week I struggled - sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. There was no apparent connection to electricity usage or any outside factors. It drove me nuts. Then one day it went stable and I refused to touch it anymore out of the supestition I might lose the connection again. About a month later from one moment to the next the connection was gone again. Nothing I did could fix it. Nothing else in the house had changed at the time. Again, I swore at the thing and cursed it for about an hour before I gave up. Since TEVION don't have their own support I called the listed Global Tronics 24/7 support hotline but it was closed on a Sunday. Not quite 48 hours later the connection was back. Another month later the same problem promptly occured again. I was getting sick of it now. This time I managed to get through to the not-quite-24/7 hotline. The operator couldn't tell me anything new. There was no diagnostic software, I had already done everything he could think of. He told me to send the adapters in for them to check. Yeah, right, and wait for however long it would take them to look them over and maybe come to a conclusion. I actually just wanted to throw them at somebody's head. Each of them individually. Of course, a day later everything worked just fine. And of course, it happened again. After only two weeks this time. My parents were already laughing about it saying the little devices needed time to rest once in awhile. What got to me was the fact that I couldn't find out what caused the problem and how to fix or prevent it. I was beginning to have fantasies of doing percussive maintenance - with a sledge hammer. Since then the connection has failed several times, at shorter and shorter intervals until finally this week I blew my top. I stuffed everything into a bag and did what I should have done months ago. I took the whole pile of crap back to Aldi. And I bought a different set of adapters by the inventors of the whole technology Devolo. It did cost me an extra €30 but I plugged the adapters in and things worked. Sometimes, I guess, it does pay to spend a bit more and not just buy some cheap, no-name trash. This was also the last time I bought anything with the TEVION logo on it.
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