Ada

Two weeks ago today, Susan suffered a grave injury. I wasn’t there to see it happen. One moment, she was healthy and happy, and I stepped out for a few minutes to return to her completely unresponsive. I even thought she might be dead. I shook her, anxiously waiting for any response, any sign she might recover. But though there still were some faint sounds of life, she gave no indication of coming back. Susan was sick, very sick, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

Susan is an HP dv9700 series laptop, which I purchased about eighteen months ago. Susan replaced her aging and increasingly finicky predecessor, Naoko, a Dell Inspiron 9300 purchased in June of 2005, who had become more and more a crotchety old spinster. At times, she would shout with her cacophonous fans, she refused to actually go anywhere, as her battery refused to hold charge, and when you asked her to boot up, well, she was going to get around to it on her own time, thank you very much. Naoko’s only task now is to serve, essentially, as a DVD player connected to the television, a task which, despite her tempers, she is able to perform admirably to this day. Over the course of these last eighteen months, however, Susan seemed to have retained most of her youthful vigor. So long as I have provided her with a fresh operating system every six months or so, she has performed loyally, with few of the signs of decrepitude that seem to creep so quickly into laptops.

Nevertheless, I was dissatisfied in some respects with the quality of Susan’s performance. Her effort has always been excellent – she tries, oh, how she does. But there is only so much computing power that can be fit into a machine of her size and power requirement, and my hunger for computation is deep and grumbling. Susan has always delivered as much performance as she was designed to give, but it was not always enough. I am being intentionally vague here, but know that I had begun to contemplate the nature of her successor machine, and had come to the decision some months ago to acquire a desktop machine. I have not used a desktop as my primary machine since Naoko came into my life over four years ago. Before her was Sal the Second, a stalwart desktop computer of my own construction who yet stands, as a ghostly visage, at the back of my closet, a reminder of an era past, legendary and grand.

Contemplating a desktop again evoked the pride and heroism of this age, a time when my machine was mine, an artifact crafted of my own labor from parts selected through study and scrutiny. One never knows their computer as well as when they build it themselves – every unique nuance of the machine becomes like the habit of a lover, familiar and comforting even when it is inconvenient or hard. There is a freedom, as well, that cannot be bought in a constructed machine – every aspect of the machine is changeable, every part replaceable, every variable mutable. And, of course, there is the pride of workmanship.

So this summer I decided that I would build a new desktop machine sometime this fall – I was thinking October or November. I had come to the conclusion that trying to purchase high performance laptops to function as primary machines was futile, and that I would never be able to replicate the computational capacity of a desktop while maintaining mobility. The proper way to do it, I decided, was to have two computers – a powerful desktop as the primary machine, and a small, lightweight laptop to be used only as a mobile work platform for school and business. Naoko and Susan had both been hybrids of these, with mid-range computational capacity while remaining fairly heavy, hot, and short-winded. With Susan, I had become dissatisfied with this model – it was time for a reversion to the ways of old.

But it was for a different time – later, when I had become settled into the habits of grad school, and had enough money accumulated to easily absorb the cost of the monster I had in mind. But two weeks ago, on the evening of my first day of grad school, Susan had her terrible injury, and I was forced to contemplate the newcomer early.

Susan contains a GeForce 8600M graphics processing system. This device interfaces Susan’s display with the rest of her components, and without it, Susan is dumb – she cannot display anything on her screen. The GeForce 8600M contains a G84M GPU, which has been identified of late as a chip which appears to be prone to a relatively high failure rate after about 12-18 months. In the last few months, a large number of people with this particular type of graphics set in their laptops have reported complete graphical failure – their screen simply do not display anything.

I was not aware of any of this about the GeForce 8600M two weeks ago. Susan was happily displaying all manner of beautiful graphics, and I was quite content with them. As I said, however, I left the room briefly at one point to return to a blank screen. Nothing I did would cause any change in the state of the screen, which I thought was very odd. Eventually, I hard-booted the machine through the power switch, and watched for Susan to boot up fine, as computers are wont to do after scaring you with some near-fatal error. However, this time, nothing came up. She made all the normal booting-up sounds, and her drive activity light blinked furiously, as though she were trying very hard at something. I connected a spare external display to her VGA port, and then to her DVI port, to no avail. Fearing that some problem had occurred with the CPU or hard drives, I hard-booted again and waited while the lights blinked and drives whirred. Eventually, the sounds stopped, and the drive activity light went dark. Tentatively, I typed my Windows login password, and pressed enter.

The drive activity light started blinking. The drives started whirring. Susan could still boot, and she could still hear me. Susan wasn’t dead – she was only maimed.

Some looking about online through Keith’s computer showed us the information about the 8600M and the G84M. The problem is widespread enough that some laptop manufacturers have begun issuing contingency warranty extensions on certain models for problems related to this graphics system, including Apple, Sony, and yes, even HP. However, when looking at the models covered by HP’s contingency offering, the dv9700 in absent – Susan is not covered for free. And folks with Susan’s brethren online were quoting $300-400 to repair the offending hardware.

Initially, there was a bit of panic in me. O, what fate! I would be denied a computer for several days, perhaps more than a week, while I waited for Susan’s transit to and from HP’s repair center, and it would cost me several hundred dollars to affect the repair. But it occurred to me almost immediately – the successor machine. I was set to build it in a few months anyway, and why spend an extra $400 now to preserve Susan until her eventual phasing out? In a fashion very uncharacteristic of me, I made a snap decision – now was the time. The new machine would be built, and it would be built now! I temporarily stirred Naoko from her retirement, and went about choosing the parts for my new machine.

Choosing parts took me almost two days, which was still a very short time, I feel. In that time, however, I was able to satisfy myself with my decisions. The new desktop would be a monster, the most powerful machine I had ever owned, even relative to the technology available at the time. I submitted the order on Wednesday of that week, and waited impatiently for the following Monday, when my parts were expected to arrive.

So one week ago, my new system arrived, embryonic and fragmented, mere seeds which needed to be planted together in order to become fertile. It was with great apprehension that day that I put together all these parts, partly because I was afraid of some slip of the hand that would rend asunder the delicate threads of gold and silicon I toyed with, and partly also because it had been many years since the construction of Sal the Second, and I wasn’t sure I remembered how it all went together – indeed, many things have changed. (One thing that hasn’t changed is the alarming amount of force required to push some of the chips and connectors securely in place. I don’t think I will ever get used to that – these are delicate instruments, after all.) However, something else well out of my control also weighed heavily on my mind – the threat of the dreaded DOA. Some computer components arrive dead-on-arrival, and the only recourse then is to issue a request with the distributor for a replacement. It would cost me nothing, but it was dreaded all the same for its inconvenience and because it might not be obvious which part was DOA if there was such a problem – motherboard problems might look an awful lot like CPU problems. I estimated a fairly low failure rate for my essential components – even my optimistic estimate only gave me even odds of having no failed parts.

However, I had another problem Monday. Everything assembled and in the case, I went to connect all the power connectors so that I could boot the system for the first time. I had searched carefully for a power supply – my graphics card specifically requires two PCI-E power connectors, and few power supplies have this, so it was my primary search criterion. I connected these without issue, and was pleased with the way everything fit in there. However, something I had not used as a search criterion was a CPU power connector. When I constructed Sal the Second, such things did not even exist – there was a single large plug that went to the motherboard. Now there is one to power the motherboard, and a smaller, separate connector providing power to the CPU. For the past few years, this has been a 4-pin 12-volt connector, which my power supply had. However, the CPU/motherboard combination I had purchased was of a new design, and it required a new 8-pin connector.

Sigh.

Keith and I searched a bit online, and found that the voltage requirements are still the same – 12 volts. Furthermore, since old-style molex connectors are also 12 volts, it is possible to adapt one to the other. And indeed, such adapters exist – I purchased one right away for a pittance, and waited several days again for it to arrive.

On Friday, finally, I installed the necessary connector and switched the system on for the first time, with a Windows 7 disc in the optical drive to begin installing my operating system right away. After an excruciating few seconds, there was the characteristic beep that indicated the post test was complete and successful. And a few seconds later, my new computer was informing me that she was booting from the DVD in the drive. Some time later, Windows 7 was installed and booting properly, and initial checks of the system seemed to indicate what I had only given myself a half chance of occurring – no DOA components! Everything was talking, and everything was giving a thumbs up. The system breathed her first breaths that night, and they were fresh and even.

With her successful boot, however, I wasn’t out of the woods. Yesterday, I began the process of extracting necessary information from Susan’s hard drives, and transferring it to the new system. However, I cannot see anything on Susan, of course – I could not just transfer the information to external drives, and use them to dump the data on the new computer. I would have no way to accessing anything on Susan. Surgery was necessary. My plan was simply to remove Susan’s hard drives through panels on her underside, and connect them directly to my new system by internal connections, one at a time, to access the information directly. Simple enough.

When I opened up the bottom panels on Susan, however, I was treated to a surprise. On the hard drives therein, where I expected standard SATA connectors, there was a strange comb-connector device that I had never seen before. It looked proprietary – oh, how I loathe proprietary connections. I reasoned, however, that surely it must simply be some special laptop connector – to be sure, the way the connections fit together with these copper combs, bulky cables and plastic connector heads are obviated, perfect for fitting into a laptop. If they were standard to laptops, that gave me one option – Naoko.

I raced through the process in my mind. For Susan’s C-drive, containing a functional operating system, I would need to install the hard drive in Naoko’s single drive bay, and boot up the system. I could then transfer any files I needed to an external drive, and use that to move data to the new system. For Susan’s D-drive, however, without a functional operating system, the process would need to get complicated. If I installed that drive in Naoko, I would not be able to boot up. I would need to format one of my external USB drives, and install an operating system to it. I would then need to connect this device to Naoko, and alter her boot order to try to get her to boot to the external device, a task I’m not even sure is possible with her hardware. Then I could access the internal drive from Susan, and transfer the necessary information to the bootable external drive. Not so simple anymore.

After going through this whole process in my mind and becoming thoroughly disgusted by the complexity of it, I noticed something odd about the comb connectors on Susan’s drives. Tentatively, I pried at one of them. An adapter! It came off! And behold, below this bizarre and distasteful nonstandard connection – SATA ports! A sigh of relief issued from my lips, and I went about my original plan, which proceeded without incident. With all my essential information transferred and moved to the proper places, I could finally call my new system complete.

Her name is Ada. She is named for Lady Lovelace, the 19th century logician and mathematician frequently credited as the world’s first computer programmer. Lovelace corresponded regularly with Charles Babbage, designer of the mechanical Analytical Engine, and actually wrote programs for it, though the machine was never actually constructed during hers or Babbage’s lifetimes. Since then, however, the machine has been built, and Lovelace’s programs have proven to do exactly what she claimed they would be capable of, making them the first functional programs for a general purpose computer, written during the 1840s.

She runs a Core i7 920 processor on an EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard with 6gb of Corsair DDR3-1600 RAM running in triple channel mode. Her graphics are displayed via a factory-overclocked MSI GeForce GTX275 with a heat pipe cooling block, which communicates with an Asus 21.5″ 1080p LCD display. Ada has a total of 4TB of storage space in two Western Digital 1TB hard drives, and one Seagate 2TB drive. Ada is cooled comfortably by one 140mm and three 120mm case fans. She runs quieter than Sal the Second ever did, and quieter than Naoko does anymore. Susan, admittedly, was always the softest talker. I liked that.

I’ll miss Susan. She went before her time. Though really, I suppose I shouldn’t speak of her as though she were dead – she is repairable. However, right now, I don’t think I’m willing to spend the money to have her mended. Ada is a beautiful monster, and I don’t think I need Susan right now. I will, however, continue to watch HP’s website – I’m holding out hope that they will extend their offer of contingency to the dv9700 series. When that happens, not a moment will pass before I ship Susan off to receive repairs. In the meantime, however, I don’t need a mobile computer. Ada, this sessile beast, is handling things quite well.

Advertisement