Tuesday, December 15, 2009

if you don't hear from me in several weeks

Call an ambulance, because it means I've had a heart attack in my office. For some reason, when our computer gets a little overloaded on tasks (switching between window panes too rapidly), it gets angry and BEEPS at me. It blurts out of the speaker and goes directly to my heart, causing a momentary stop in my pulse. Also, I can feel the synapses in my brain fuzz up.

And just now when it happened, it made my right eye twitch.

3 comments:

Dave said...

Is it a 1980's kind of beep or does it have the rich full tonal quality of a modern beep? If it's a 1980's beep then your computer's fan might be clogged with dust and can no longer cool itself very well. We had a laptop slowly die this way. Towards the end we could only use the machine if one of us held the vacuum cleaner hose next to the ventilation slots on it.

I've heard disassembling the machine and cleaning it with compressed air helps.

Erin Gong said...

Definitely a 1980s beep. I did more cause-effect analysis and realized that it only happens when I'm working on a virtual machine (connecting virtually to an on-campus computer), so I think it has something to do with how the beeps from error messages come across my sound on the virtual machine, rather than any issues specific to my computer.

Dave, I almost don't believe you actually did the vacuum cleaner thing, except that Abe did a similar thing when he had to crunch some data on our laptop overnight. He propped it up on a pair of shoes and had a huge fan blowing on it, to keep it from overheating.

Dawn said...

Back away from the computer....