That's under the hood of my DELL Precision Desktop 470 that will be three years old next week and thank god I have the GOLD Tech support because I just had the RAM or rather the RAM sockets on the motherboard go bad. (see those pink arrows) This took about an hour on the phone with the technical support guy at Dell who walked through opening up the CPU and swapping out the four bars of RAM and rebooting. It looks like one of the ram sockets on the motherboard is fried.
Oh, I've had problems before, but only minor hardware failures and crashes because I have a duo-RAID hard drive. The latter is annoying, but I could fix that blue screen of death and by reinstalling the operating system. I got smarter along the way and mirrored the operating system so I didn't have to reinstall everything and I have all my data backed up either on a local hard drive (three copies) and online. I always seem to have computer problems before important presentations (see here and here).
I don't need this to happen to me. I'm about to embark upon one of my busiest travel weeks ever. I'm presenting and doing a workshop in Romania and then will be flying back to Boston via Miami to present at the Technology Affinity Group (Foundation IT folks) Conference. Grr...
The Technician from Dell ordered my new RAM (and a motherboard just in case that is the problem) and a technician will call by noon to schedule the on-site. Fingers crossed, my desktop should be back up by tomorrow afternoon.
I bet you are wondering how and where I'm blogging about this .... Well, before my passion was social media, I spent many years helping nonprofits do technology plans. I learned a thing or two about the importance of basic infrastructure and processes - I'm my own IT department so I have a disaster plan. For catastrophic hardware issues, I have my back up computer - my laptop and I can plug my desktop keyboard, modem, and monitor) and viola I'm up and running. Second, I have all essential data - documents, photos, multimedia, email, etc backed up - both in local copies and if possible online.
My only inconvenience right now is that my printer is older and my laptop is vista and right now I'm too stressed and distracted to figure out if there is a driver or not for VISTA (my desktop is XP). I'll do that in the event that DELL on-site support can't get here and replace my RAM and motherboard or I get Dell Hell.
Hmm .. I'm going to see if Lionel does as good a job at customer service as Frank does.
While I specialize in social media and spent a good amount of time on it - you need basic infrastructure which includes hardware, software, internet access, technical support, back up, etc. If your computer were to blow up or if you had major problem, could you be back up and working within an hour? And, you should also know how you get attention through social media for technical support too ...