Terrible Week for Tech

This week has been absolutely heartbreaking for technology.

Last Saturday, mid-movie, my surround sound receiver stopped working. It would do this thing where it turns on for like 3 seconds and then turns off. I contacted Yamaha support, they gave me a few things to do, but its determined that the thing is dead.

We were going to ship it back to NewEgg.com where we bought it from, but they don't accept bulk returns or exchanges.

Looked up the nearest authorized Yamaha dealer and they are almost 300 miles away in Springfield Ill.

Tomorrow morning, I'm waking up early and calling Yamaha customer service to see if I can send it in to at least get repaired if not exchanged for a new one. We only had it for a month and a half.

Then strike 2 came when my laptop stopped working completely. Slider knocked it off a table about a month ago and put a dent in the side of it, but everything was working fine. I figured I could sell the laptop on Ebay and maybe get like $150 so I could upgrade a few pieces of the current Desktop we have.

Well I was cleaning it off and realized when it was booting it was making an obnoxious beeping noise until you started clicking random keys.

So I took the keyboard apart and found a red powder substance as well as about 123 billion cat hairs. I spent two hours cleaning the hell out of the laptop, put the keyboard back together, only to find that it wouldn't boot at all anymore. I tried several things to get it up and running, but thus far nothing has gotten it to work. My $1200 laptop I bought only two years ago... is dead.

Then I discovered that the computer we just bought from Lacy has issues playing normal DVDs. Everything shows up all pixelated. On top of that I can't get this wireless mouse we purchased to work or any shortcut keys on this keyboard. Basically when I get home from troubleshooting for 8 hours someday this week, I'm going to need to do some troubleshooting.

There are several upgrades I want to do to the desktop, but we haven't had money recently. (Found out we WAAAAAYYYY overpaid on a credit card which now has a zero balance, but we've been eating peanut butter and jelly for a couple weeks now.) So if anyone has any spare computer parts lying around like a decent videocard, hard drive, extra flat screen monitor, or powerful DVD drive, let me know. We'll talk, maybe we can work something out.

Sometimes I ask myself is it worth all the technology and trouble. Of course it is, but sometimes I'd rather live in a cabin in the Mountains and sit around cleaning a gun all day.