We arrived home from a party at a colleague’s house Wednesday night and, even though I was tired, I was feeling good about the fact that I had almost finished my major project over the break – my pre-tenure review packet. So, I decided I’d spend an hour so playing my latest PC game – Borderlands. It’s not the friendliest game around, but it does what I need – get my mind off work completely.
Excited to waste an hour of my life on senseless video game violence, I pushed the power button on my computer and… nothing. My computer turned on (that is, fans started spinning and LEDs indicated there was power), but it wouldn’t even boot into the BIOS – nothing on the monitors, no video output at all. Having recently upgraded my video card (to better support my enormous dual-monitor setup; Debi and I gave each other dual-monitors for Christmas – twin 23″ widescreen monitors – yum!), I thought it might be that the card was bad. I swapped it out for my old one which works, but still nothing. After several hours fiddling around testing various components I concluded that my motherboard was shot. 🙁
Without my powerful desktop, I’ve been forced to spend the last two days working on my junkie work laptop (Toren crawls faster than this thing computes and Toren can’t crawl yet!). On a positive note, Debi did say I can upgrade my computer in replacing the motherboard. So, new motherboard, new CPU (quad-core baby!), and more RAM. Hopefully when that arrives early next week it will make for a happy beginning to 2010.
So, I’m sad that my computer died, but excited for the faster computer that is coming. I’m not as sad as when my last motherboard/CPU died (about a year and a half ago – Debi was using it at the time). That one was the first one that I built from scratch (okay, not from scratch, but I pieced it together from parts I selected and ordered). I also named it “God”; I usually name my computers after deity – between Debi and I we’ve owned: Jehovah, Apollo, Zeus, Athena, and even Elohim. I was really sad when “God” died… But at least he was on “heaven” when it happened… That’s the name of our network.
