Students’ ThinkPads are often a source of headaches
By Ryan Eanes
Student Columnist

You may have noticed (but probably did not) that I was not featured in the Old Gold and Black last week. This is not because I wrote a controversial and highly offensive article that could not be published, although I am certainly capable of doing so. Rather, it was because my ThinkPad was out of service.

See, I think the truth of the matter is that my ThinkPad hates me. In fact I think my first ThinkPad hated me as well, and I’m not just blindly saying that.

When I first arrived at the university two years ago and got my brand spanking new 390E, I thought that that was something really special … until I noticed that the CD drive never worked. And most of the keys on the keyboard would stick a lot.
Since I didn’t really have any spare CD drives lying around to replace the faulty one with, I took it to Information Systems and they graciously fixed it for me (translation: they hesitantly replaced the drive and probably wondered if I had been using the CD drawer as a cup holder).

But the problem with the keys sticking still remained, and no amount of banging on them seemed to change the keys’ minds about working properly. So I ended up ripping the “o,” “e,” “p,” “i” and semicolon keys off of the keyboard to see what the problem was. Sure enough, there were huge dust clods the size of swamp rats living under there. I thought I could end the problem once and for all by using a can of pressurized air to blast the dust clods out from under the keys, but not surprisingly, it didn’t work. All of the dust clods just merrily skittered to and fro and then took up residence under the “9” and quotation mark keys.

So back to IS I went again, this time to beg them to replace my keyboard. Suspiciously they did so, probably thinking this time that I had dumped soda directly into the keyboard merely for entertainment value (I really didn’t. I promise).

Several weeks into the school year my roommate and I stumbled on to the idea that perhaps the reason our computers kept acting up was because they didn’t feel loved. So, to make them feel important and to boost their electronical senses of self-esteem, we stuck our names on our computers and printers to give them a sense of “belonging.” And it worked – my computer never malfunctioned again after that.

Well … at least not until the Gatorade incident.

By “the Gatorade incident,” I mean that something bad happened to my computer less than a week before we left for the summer. That’s right, something got spilled on it. Ridicule me all you like, but at least it was an accident, unlike the incident in which my roommate discovered that someone had actually urinated in someone else’s ThinkPad.
But let’s not go there today.

Anyway, Gatorade spilled on my ThinkPad less than a week before summer began, and it didn’t seem to hurt it. At first I quickly decided otherwise when it stopped responding and instead decided to make loud obnoxious beeping and “pooting” noises. Apparently if this happens it means that the motherboard has blown out, which is normally considered to be a bad thing. So a week and a half and $950 later, my computer was returned to me along with a brand new motherboard.

Needless to say I thought my troubles would end when I turned in my old clunky 390E, but not so … for these newfangled A21m’s are devious and sneaky in all of the bad ways. For instance, the new keyboard on the new computer decided to stick just as much as my old keyboard on the old computer.

What’s more, the sound cards are particularly bad… at first, I thought it was just my computer, but I found out otherwise when nearly everyone complained that they were hearing a lot of static in the speakers (which, let’s face it, have never been good) while listening to their Aretha Franklin MP3s.

I have to admit that, as a Resident Technology Adviser, I am expected to know every single blasted thing about these computers, but I am only human (mostly), and so I don’t know how to solve every single problem that might come about. Don’t expect me to come to your room wielding a soldering iron and a digital multimeter from Radio Shack, because that’s just not going to happen. What happens from time to time is that I am forced to say the phrase that university students dread more than any other…
“Take your computer to IS.”

Honestly, the people that work for IS are all perfectly nice and fine and good, but they have to deal with many students whose computer expertise doesn’t stretch much beyond “press this button to turn it on.”

So since there are so many … uh … challenged students mixed in with competent ones, IS is unfortunately often caught up in a backlog of work that has to be cleared out before anything new can be taken on. And as a result it takes a few days to find out anything once you’ve surrendered your ThinkPad to them.

What isn’t so fun, though, is trying to live for that 36-hour period without having a computer (if the IS people decide you don’t deserve a loaner computer because you look like you’d probably just use it as a paperweight anyway). It’s near impossible for me to live normally without checking my email four times. An hour. Until 3 a.m.

And not having Instant Messenger? You might as well exile yourself from the rest of society … I mean, come on! Who uses that archaic “telephone” thing anyway?
Fortunately IS has a relatively quick turnaround time, and I’m back on track with my seemingly operational computer.

Let’s just hope that this one feels “loved” enough to keep on working.