8/18/2011

"It's Dead, Jim"

I knew it was coming, but hoped the inevitable would hold off for just a little while longer. Today was the day the inevitable happened.

The Official Weekend Pundit Main Computer bit it.

I got home from work, took care a few things in the kitchen, went into the office and turned on the computer.

Nothing happened.

Press the power button again. Nada.

So I opened the side panel of the machine too see if there was anything obvious, like a loose connector or some other loose thing that shouldn't be. Nothing. I saw the 'Power Good' indicator was on, meaning all the power supplies were operating, but the machine wouldn't start. The fans didn't start. The drives didn't spin up. Nothing.

The computer was dead.

It wasn't a surprise as I'd been having problems with it for months. I did the smart thing and backed up all the data files on to DVDs and a spare hard drive just in case. (Since this failure isn't drive related I should be able to pull everything off the main drive and onto another computer. The back ups I made won't have the most recent data on them.)

I can't really complain as this machine has been in constant use for six years. It had a few minor upgrades along the way (A new video card after the first one died. An additional hard drive and second DVD-RW drive. Additional memory.) All in all it did its job with few hiccups.

But it was getting slow. Keeping it up to snuff was taking more time and effort. Storage capacity on the hard drives was dwindling away and would have required a major upgrade. It was probably going to require a complete re-stage (back up all data and reinstall the OS, run all of the OS updates, then reinstall all of the programs). I wasn't looking forward to that at all. And that was on top of all the problems I'd started seeing some time last winter.

And now it's dead.

So it looks like I'll be shopping for a new machine starting first thing tomorrow.

Posting may be a little spotty until I get the new machine as there will be three of us sharing the same computer for the time being.