Kaputt

I'm at my parents' place. That's nothing new, but the fact I have to use the Internet here is. The thing is, my computer is broken.

For the tech-interested: Yesterday Pauline was using the computer when it suddenly shut down. I'm used to this happening every once in a few months. Computers are complex beasts, so sometimes it may happen that it cannot crunch more data than it is doing already and it just shuts down or reboots in despair. However, this time it shut down immediately after pressing the power button again. Even after we let it cool down for a while it still didn't boot up.

We figured the CPU had broken down. A little fast, after not even 3 years of service, but well, those things happen. A nasty financial pinch in the butt. Pauline wanted to upgrade the system sometime this year, but now she has to do it sooner. It's a waste of money to replace the broken parts with identical new ones when she was going to give the system an overhaul anyway.

My mom happened to stop by today, so we went to the computer store together. Thankfully we go there a lot and the people behind the counter know our faces. They often give us discounts or free parts. I think 25% of my computer as it is now has not been paid for, thanks to their massive discounts. The guy there said he thought a broken power supply was most likely. When it's emitting too much power the voltage of the CPU rises extremely, causing it to run harder and thus it's giving off a lot more heat. Of course my CPU cooler can only cool so much and the system will shut down automatically when it reaches critical heat levels.

Alas, it did not work. Even with a new power supply the system is still booting up at 70 degrees Celsius. After 2 minutes it's over 90 degrees and shutting down. Tomorrow I will have to return the power supply and do the system upgrade. A better CPU (most like somewhere in the 3.4-3.6 GHz range) and a new motherboard, one with better features. My current motherboard is a b**** to work with. It doesn't accept more than 512 megabytes of RAM, most likely it causes my graphics cards to die when I hook up my 21"monitor to the VGA port and I always run into compatibility issues when running games, thanks to that motherboard. I'm happy I can rid myself of that thing now.

In the future all that's left to buy and install is a new graphics card ro replace my current Radeon 9600 SEC. I hope everything will be in working order again by tomorrow afternoon. Being without a PC is a major handicap.

In the meantime I have a lot of time to game. I broke the Top 1000 in Bejeweled 2 Action Mode and I'm still improving. That's about the only good thing that happened to me in the last two days.

Hopefully I'm back in Internet action this Saturday, with a beefed up system, a system that should cut it for the next 2 to 3 years, hopefully without stuff breaking down on me. Until then, I'll be disappearing into offline obscurity.