The Week In Review

Time for a round-up post of what has been happening over the last week.

Dell FAIL Redux
Just recently I wrote a post berating Dell for shipping a Studio Hybrid machine to me with a faulty fan.  Unfortunately the story got worse before it got better!  I received word just before the Easter break that the fan and also the heatsink for the CPU had been replaced and it was on the way back to me.
It was delivered on Tuesday morning when I got back to work (in a laptop box that didn’t fit the machine no less), covered in scratches!

As I discovered machines don’t go back directly to Dell themselves, like many large firms they use a third party repair firm and I obviously got the heavy handed YTS trainee working on mine.  The blue plastic sleeve that the machine sits in looked like it had been dragged along a workbench top, and the actual machine wasn’t immune to a few marks and scrapes.
All very unimpressive for a brand new machine that was repaired when in reality is should have been replaced with a brand new one (and I should have politely requested this during my support call, that’s what you get for being affable perhaps ).

Fortunately Dell customer service and support is actually very good, and they sent me out a replacement sleeve and the machine is installed under the TV and working extremely well (there may well be a full review of it in the near future if I get time).

Twitter
I’ve created a second Twitter account for business and IT related tweets to keep work separate from personal stuff.  The account name is CullenIT if you would like to follow me.  If things come to fruition in the near future that feed should be integrated with the business site.  Speaking of which…

Business
I never blogged it here, but I made a plan a while ago to start building my business when we came back from our holiday.  When I started the business almost three years ago I always intended to go contracting for a few years, and then try to move into consultancy and work with a number of my own clients.

Incredibly the very first day I started to work towards that someone came along and I am very happy to be supporting a local web design firm, Forest Design.  Forest Design is a family run business looking after nearly 200 web sites for local businesses, so if you are in need of some quality web design done by a very nice group of people, tell them I sent you!
This is also pushing me on to getting the business web site finally up and running, although I am wondering whether I should just give up on Joomla and go back to WordPress for the time being.  I know WordPress and its quirks rather well after almost three years of blogging, and the prospect of spending a large amount of time getting Joomla to work the way I want it to doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm.  We shall see.

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Surround
I picked up one of these sound cards from Creative this week.  I have been using the onboard sound from my standard Dell Inspiron desktop machine ever since I bought it (having sent my ultra l337 X-Fi Elite Pro card to my design genius Anto a few months ago) but stereo sound from a 5.1 speaker setup isn’t exactly great.

This is a USB SoundBlaster designed to add decent sound primarily to notebook PCs, but it works quite happily in my Vista x64 machine.  It contains the all important digital optical output and for £50 I’ve got a mini X-Fi card that sounds great.  I highly recommend it to anyone in need of something slightly better than onboard PC audio.

Buffy
And finally for today, after years of having various people pester me into watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I finally relented over the Easter weekend.  I couldn’t see what the fuss was all about after the first few episodes, but then something clicked and I can’t stop watching it.
We finished watching the first season last night, so only six more seasons and around 130 episodes to go then!

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Category: General, Personal, Site News, Tech Stuff