Tag: hardware

When it rains it pours.

Last week my Nano died. It won’t hold a charge, or at least it won’t play more than about 4 minutes before it reboots. It also can’t get the Nike + sensor to work, and it’s out of warranty. So it’s essentially DoA right now and not worth fixing. My guess is it would be $50 to fix it at a minimum, which seems silly. Not sure what I’ll do for run tracking for now other than manual stuff.

Then two days ago I bent my jawbone headset and snapped off the ear loop. It was already semi-flaky since the case got disconnected, so I ordered a new one.

Yesterday Twhirl stopped working on my desktop. I got an update and all of a sudden it won’t log in. It reports a bad password if I put one in, but the correct password just freezes at the login screen.

Today Livemeeting broke and I couldn’t easily participate in a work meeting. It somewhat sucked since I had things to discuss.

What will go wrong tomorrow? Almost afraid to go skiing.

We are trying to buy another property here at the ranch. My wife had to leave town in the middle of this, and asked me if I could sign the contract and then scan it in to email to the other party. It was late at night, I was tired and didn’t want to mess with it that night, so I said sure.

The next morning I hooked up our ancient Epson Perfection 610 to my machine, a process that involves dragging a large piece of hardware out of the closet, plugging it in the wall with the cord running across the floor to the scanner on the floor, and plugging a USB cable into my desktop. I used to do that every month or so for expenses, but apparently I haven’t in a few months. Guess I know why Accounting is a little annoyed with me.

The scanner didn’t work.

Windows 7 x64 didn’t recognize it, and when I tried downloading 2 different drivers from Epson that didn’t work I stopped. I had a virus on my machine recently and am nervous about making too many changes without really thinking about it. I plugged the scanner into my Windows 7 x86 machine and it didn’t work their either. So much for extensive Windows 7 support of older hardware.

Since I had committed to doing this for my wife, and I do need a scanner, I decided to look for one. I had a conference call, but a cell phone and a mute button let me drive to Best Buy and grab a new scanner for $90. I decided on an Epson Workforce 610 because it was wireless, did what I needed, would handle copies and faxing as well, and the 18 year old at Best Buy said he had one and it worked great.

I brought it home, basically removed all the plastic wrap and tape, loaded ink cartridges, and it was ready. I think I pressed 3 buttons for it to auto detect my wireless network and connect. I ran a CD install of 3 or 4 programs (to handle printing, management, scanning, fax) and then my Win 7, x64 machine detected the printer and sent a test page over. That was cool, but scanning was what I needed.

I brought up the scanner utility, put the first page of the contract on the bed and hit scan. Across the room, through the magic of wireless, the image appeared saved on my hard drive. I added the rest of the contract in the document feeder, and soon I had 16 jpgs in a new folder.

That was cool. Scanning has always been a bit of a hassle, like printing, but this was a very cool device.

And my daughter thinks that the color inkjet is “the bomb” for printing pictures of cats.