Back On Track

Check out this awesome EVE song paradoy by Aideron Robotics pilot Billy Daniels.


Followup on the Cautionary Tale from last week.

After talking to a few people the hope arose that there might be a jumper on my motherboard wherein I could reset the BIOS to factory default and save my machine. I got the motherboard details from inside the box (careful not to let any tears fall on the delicate electronics) and did some more googling. And then found this very current Reddit thread where several other people ran into the exact same problem and confirmed from ASUS support that the motherboard is bricked; only option is to replace.

Knowing that the first instruction when dealing with ASUS support is to try and return the PC to Best Buy, I packed it up and took Saturday afternoon to drive into town and see what I could do without an extended warranty and outside the exchange period by 4 days. (Of course)

Thanks to my amazing charm (who said Social was a dump stat?) I was able to convince the Best Buy service rep to do an exchange. Unfortunately there was no ASUS PCs left in store so he offered me a rough equivalent, first an HP with no dedicated graphics card (Um, NOPE) and secondly a more expensive Acer Aspire with i7 core, 12 GB ram instead of 8, and an NVidia GeForce 745 GTX video card.

I waffled because I had done a lot of research when I bought the ASUS and was nervous about taking an unknown quantity but I was facing few options and this seemed like the best one of a bad lot. I took it and crossed my fingers.

I got it set up for Sunday night's fleet and it seemed to operate alright, although the research into the graphics card tells me I'll need to upgrade in the future. But for now, it should suffice.

Oh, and I deleted every bloatware I could find on it first so I shouldn't get any more unexpected upgrade options.