Ahi was the name of my laptop (notebook) PC that I worked for hours to set up to do digital recording. For the last year of the 404 Not Found live experience, I used it along with software synthesizers instead of a traditional hardware synthesizer. I learned so much through trial-and-error of getting it to record multi-channel audio, that I wrote a series of web pages about it. People still occasionally send me emails, even two years later, saying thanks for warning them about such-and-such.
Well, Ahi died last week. I now have a new laptop. Here’s the final entry in my “laptop based DAW project journal”:
March 31, 2005 – The Final Chapter
Ahi is dead. Two weekends ago, I was watching TV and typing on my laptop at the same time. I noticed the battery indicator was getting low, so I plugged in the AC power. A second later, I smelled something strange. Another second later, smoke rose up through the keys in the keyboard and my fingers. It was like fog in a bad horror movie. And at that moment, I knew Ahi had breathed its last breath. I cried out and yanked the power cord out.
I’ll never know for sure what happened. I may have plugged the AC power cord into the USB connector in the back, sending a huge amount of current through the USB circuit path. That shouldn’t be possible, but on later inspection I saw that it is just possible to fit the plug of the AC adapter into the USB port. Bad design! Another possibility is that I plugged in the power cord where I was supposed to and something just shorted inside.
I was totally shocked for about an hour. First off, I knew I’d just destroyed my laptop computer. Second, I realized that I hadn’t backed up either of the two scripts I’d been working on using Ahi. I was more upset about the possibility of losing 30 or 40 hours of creative work, than about the computer itself.
But things turned out for the best, I suppose. I took Ahi into a local PC repair shop the next day, and they were able to recover my files off the hard drive. And Ahi was still under the 3 year Best Buy Personal Service Plan that I’d bought along with it. I took it into Best Buy that same day and they said they’d have to ship it to their service center to see what could be done.
Today, I got a phone message saying they were going to “junk out” the laptop. That means it would cost more to fix it than it’s worth to them. So, they let me choose a brand new laptop off the shelf. I didn’t get one of the original dollar amount, but rather one of the a “comparable technology.” I was happy with what the sales rep suggested, and now I’m the new proud owner of a Toshiba M45-S331. It’s got a 33% faster (at least) processor than my old PC, twice the hard drive space, and a built-in 802.11g WiFi connection that actually works (unlike the 802.11b on the vpr Matrix).
I’m not sure how much – if any – music stuff I’ll be doing on this machine. A couple months ago, I took my Linux PC and converted it to Windows XP for use as my primary music computer now. It’s so much more stable and fast than Ahi ever was. I imagine I may need or want to do some mobile multitrack recording someday, but that’s certainly not in the near future since my band 404 Not Found essentially split up and played our last gig exactly 1 year ago from tomorrow (April Fools 2004).
But I’ll leave this website up, in hopes it continues to be educational to other people trying to set up Intel laptop based digital audio workstations. If you are, good luck to you!
1 comment