Can I possibly destroy any more hardware?

In the last 30 days, I’ve killed so much hardware it’s not even funny anymore.

• Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
  • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
• Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
  • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
  • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
  • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
• Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
  • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
• My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
• Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
• Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)