Adventures in computer maintenance.

For the past few months, I have had to deal with a defective Bluetooth card in my notebook computer. The symptoms were random BSOD/crashing (especially with the Bluetooth radio and/or VPN client enabled), pop-up warnings about a USB device not functioning correctly, and a randomly repeating (highly annoying) warning tone.

After trying to reinstall my Bluetooth driver on two separate occasions, I called up Dell a month-and-a-half ago and asked for a new Bluetooth card. After letting the card sit in my room for the last month, I finally decided to install it. This was a good two-hour ordeal which involved disassembling the laptop's keyboard, display assembly, and palm rest. In any case, things seem to be working much better now. Here's a picture of my laptop disassembled: