A funny thing happened on my way to the internet this morning. And by “funny” I mean, “cruel turn which has inflicted frustration, financial loss, and the inability to continue playing Left 4 Dead”. <\/p>\n
A fan in my computer has been struggling lately. I could hear it in there, spinning up and down at regular intervals, wailing like an air raid siren. After making sure the Luftwaffe wasn’t overhead, I went back to playing Left 4 Dead with the nagging realization that the fan noise was something that Should Be Looked Into. But not right now. I mean, soon. Eventually. <\/p>\n
Sometimes the wailing would stop, which meant that either the fan had resumed normal operation, or it had stopped moving entirely. It is amazing how quickly I can turn into an optimist when pessimism is a hassle. <\/p>\n
A failing fan means something is most likely going to overheat and die. It might be the power supply (whatever) the graphics card (ouch) or the CPU (noooooooooooooo!). <\/p>\n
This morning I discovered that one should never set aside one’s pessimism. My PC is now a box of dead electronics. Swapping in a good power supply doesn’t fix it, or even provoke a murmur. It’s deceased. It has passed on. It is an ex-computer.<\/p>\n
So a new PC is now on order. (I’m currently using a ten year old machine, which has been imbued with Ubuntu. I can’t believe how well it works, given its age. ) This is all a shame. The dead PC is the first computer I’ve ever owned that still felt perfectly usable after a couple of years. I had no particular need to upgrade until the thing went and bricked itself. <\/p>\n
It took a while to find a machine that had the right features (memoryhertz and gigadrives and whatnots) without any of the wrong ones. (Windows Vista.) The machine I found is a “Vista machine with an XP configuration”. Which apparently means it comes with XP pre-installed, along with a complementary Vista-brand coaster. <\/p>\n
Which is nice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A funny thing happened on my way to the internet this morning. And by “funny” I mean, “cruel turn which has inflicted frustration, financial loss, and the inability to continue playing Left 4 Dead”. A fan in my computer has been struggling lately. I could hear it in there, spinning up and down at regular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}