Year of the Dodgy PC

Posted by Stropp on November 27, 2007

I’m writing this post using my old iBook.

This year has been a particularly frustrating year regarding my PC. Early this year the motherboard and RAM on my computer died. The repair guy reckoned that I had a power surge at my house, and this cooked the electronics. A few hundred dollars later and voila, a new motherboard and RAM. I counted myself lucky that the damage wasn’t worse.

Or was it?

A few months later, the power supply stopped working. It was effectively dead. There was no power getting through at all. It was pretty easy to diagnose, so I went to the IT warehouse close to work and bought a new one. It took fifteen minutes to install and I was back up and running.

At the time my guess was that the original power surge had damaged the power supply but not fatally. Electronic components are like that. Get them too hot, expose them to a power surge, or even handle them without adequate protection like a wrist strap and you might damage them. The damage might not be enough to kill them, but it may drastically reduce the lifespan of the component.

So this morning after I get ready for work, I go to check my email and kill the spam that accumulates on this blog and the computer is frozen. I turn the power off and reboot into windows and load my email program… and it freezes again. Second try, the same thing happens, except earlier when in the initial boot sequence. It looks like the curse of the surge demon has struck again. My guess is that the CPU is on the way out.

I tried again tonight when I got home, but it looks like the system is kaput.

I think it’s time for an upgrade. The bummer is that I’ll have to set up all my games again, amongst other software. I might need to increase the download limit on my broadband account.

Sigh.

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