Tuesday 8 January 2008

Pic of the day: The black computer is reduced to a metal brick to place my stereo on. The great-grandfather computer (it is three computer generations old) is once again my backup computer.

Bye of the North

One year ago I wrote about my black monster computer from North Corporation in Kristiansand. At that time, I got it back home after having it repaired. They were in fact quite helpful in that they gave me a new and better video card. Admittedly they tried to bill me for changing the defective RAM, but a few words with the seller cleared up that part. The 2 year warranty does not expire until the beginning of April this year. Unfortunately, North Corporation did. Expire. Close down. I am not sure what happened, given the boom here in Norway, but I assume that they lost the competition against Dell, Multicom and the other Net & Mail direct sellers.

I had hoped to sneak in another repair before the warranty expired. I already have a new computer that I bought in November, when the fan broke. But I hoped I could use the old one for some stuff - it has programs installed on it that have a limited number of installs - and eventually I could have given it away rather than throw it away. For people who don't play The Sims 2 (or first-person shooters, I guess), it would have been more than powerful enough. It has a great video card and a very fast (althoug a bit small) Raptor harddisk, which rotates 10.000 times per minute rather than 7200 which is considered standard for good disks elsewhere. (Laptops usually have even slower disks, often 5400, to save battery.)

I have mixed feelings about the demise of North Corporation. The two Windows computers I bought there were both shoddy and cost me quite a bit in taxi bills (because I don't have a car, I normally use the bus but these desktop minitowers were too heavy for that). Even though I did not pay for the repairs, I still paid the taxi which is very expensive in Norway. So I could have bought more expensive machines and still been better off if those did not break down repeatedly.

On the other hand, North would build computers for me with more flexibility than Dell. (Though Multikom is pretty close... a Norwegian webshop that sold me my current black monster.) The guys at North were obviously interested in computers themselves and knew far more than the usual shop clerk. And they did upgrade the computers when they repaired them, at least lately. So it is a bit of a loss, especially if not all computers they made were as shoddy as my Oblivion computer. Which now, unfortunately, is consigned to oblivion. Hey, I said when I ordered it that it was for Oblivion. Someone up there took me literally, perhaps...

(Today's headline is a parody on Eye of the North, a computer game expansion from NCSoft. I haven't bought it, as I already have more than enough online game with City of Heroes. But I love puns, as long as it lasts.)