You are at a party with 22 other people.
1. Estimate what the chances are of at least two people at the party having the same birthday.
2. Now calculate it. (For simplicity, feel free to assume no one was born on Feb. 29)
Yes, I was surprised.
Another excuse to use the “chess” tag. Click for biggie size.
So over the weekend my main computer died. It was an eMachines comp which has actually served quite well for the last 3 years. I was trying to upgrade the graphics card, which required a power upgrade from a measly 300W.
What I didn’t know is that eMachines comps often require a proprietary power supply. To my sorrow, I only deduced this after buying one, returning and swapping for another one, having that not work and finally testing an old power supply I knew was problem-free.
By that time, the motherboard was fried, so I had little choice but to get a new motherboard and CPU. Having little time to do research, I took one of Fry’s mid-priced combo deals, one which included the odd triple-core processor Phenom X3. I’d probably have been better off with one of Intel’s dual-core offerings. (FYI, few programs today take advantage of more than two cores. Oddy, I actually have at least one.)
The final stroke was the RAM. After spending a bit trying to shove my original memory sticks in the new motherboard, it dawned on me to take a look at what types of memory I was dealing with. Sure enough, I was trying to shove DDR sticks into DDR2 slots.
After 4 trips to Fry’s, 3 to Best Buy, and 1 to a local shop, I finally had a working system again.
It was a very aggravating day.
