I’m updating from Joel’s computer. Not too long after I got my computer back from the shop, it punked out again. It turns out that at the time it croaked on account of a no-good hard-drive, the motherboard was on its way out, too.
In a way it’s a mercy that my computer broke down again so soon after its last repair. I hadn’t uploaded a bunch of pictures or created a bunch of documents, or re-loaded a bunch of my backup stuff yet. I’d written a blog entry about Ouachita (which I didn’t post since I was waiting for my pictures to upload so I could “illustrate” it) and uploaded the photos from that trip to Flickr. Literally minutes after that upload, the machine locked up and would not re-boot. I was pretty annoyed, considering that I’d already been leery of the work done on this machine due to the whole second-hard-drive-drama. As it turns out, though, it wasn’t anything the computer shop did to it – it’s just old and worn out.
So, I’m forking out for a new motherboard (re-using the old processor) and a new video card since the old one won’t fit on this new board. Also some more RAM because the RAM I had won’t fit on this board either. What a nuisance! Also, I figured since I was going to be in it this deep already, I might as well spring for replacing that second hard drive. Whenever I get my dang computer back, it’s actually going to be pretty much entirely a whole new machine. Woot, I guess.
The next time my computer dies (hopefully not for a long, long time), I’m just going to tote the whole carcass to the computer shop and tell them to use it for donor parts and buy a whole, freshly-refurbished computer from them. No more trying to re-use used-up parts for me!