Toxor the mist man

[hirez]

Bloody computers.

The Win2k box (yes, I know. I had a really good reason for keeping winders about at the time, Fruityloops, probably) had been crashing with tedious regularity for a couple of months. Proper crashes, too. None of your pitiful 'This program has performed in repertory theatre' malarkey (though there's been plenty of that too), but a full-on *ping*-black-screen followed by the VGA bios introducing itself. It's even been producing crash-dumps, which seemed far too sensible for an OS of that sort of calibre. However, after downloading several hundred squonkabytes of M$ debug tool and symbol table, it would appear that it was indeed far too sensible because the effing debugger took a brief squint at the dumps and went "Dunno, pal. Might be the terminal drivers, might be mice in the grunge-wheels. Hard to tell, innit."

Hey ho.

One side of the audio out has been also been dying, and the noise-floor on that card (a sixpence-ha'penny SB128) was bad enough that even the massed cooling fans and my tinnitus wouldn't drown it out.

So it was about time I pulled the lid off the thing and blew the dust out of its sockets.
(You can see exactly where this is going, right?)

It did not react well to such a disturbance. In the past, either the PSU has gone 'phut' (or indeed BANG! on one startling occasion) or a good kick in the serial ports has persuaded the thing to reconsider its attitude. Not this time. We have fans and drives, but that's all. Ne display, ne pitiful yelping from the bios. Not even smoke.

Bastard.

As 'luck' would have it, I was recently handed a m/b and CPU for nowt (A MSI summint-or-other with 2-ish GHz Athlon-summint-else), but one or other component is suspect and it wants Dance-Dance-Revolution memory. I'll beetle off to Joe Maplin's house of go-faster stripes on the off-chance tomorrow, but frankly there's minimal hope of anything other than confusion and swearing.

If I'm really lucky, the HD with the email archive and MP3-pile isn't toast. There are backups and the MP3s I care about came off CD/Vinyl, but it's the hassle value...

... On the other hand...

It could turn out that some enforced (mental) decluttering and a decamp to KDE on FreeBSD ends up as being a Good Thing.

Or I could just go out tomorrow and look at trees and scenery instead.

Comments

[meltie.livejournal.com]

Jump on a bike, go up a hill and marvel at the mottled skies tomorrow. Sundays are too precious to waste on a bitty x86 box.

[sarah-mum.livejournal.com]

Trees. I'd go for trees every time.

[reddragdiva]

I think my BSD box is about to have its third wipe-and-install, probably as a Household Server without even X running on it. Though that means my l33t0r 19" LCD is doing nothing. And I'll probably run X on it just so I can run Xchat on that 24 hours a day and VNC to it from the laptop. Next question is whether to run outside services (webmail, SSH, web proxy service that I can get to from work) on that box or set up another box especially for the job.