This blog is turning into some kind of diary I'm sharing with the general public. Maybe that's the whole point of a blog, I'm not entirely sure. Beats writing notes into a little pink book starting, "Dear Diary..."
So yeah. PC. Great. Everything seemed alright when I got the replacement graphics card. Even ordered a little adapter so I could connect the whole thing to the new Samsung telly again. And then, out of nowhere, I got the old blackout again. Whole thing just crashes, screen goes black, sound loops, that's it. And of course the damn thing would refuse to boot up for no apparent reason until I unplug the power cable, re-seat the gfx card, remove a memory stick and do all kinds of random, pointless voodoo shit to calm down the angry spirits that haunts this pile of trash.
So what does that mean? Why would the whole thing just black out like that? Apparently, it wasn't my GPU's fault and after 12+ hours with memtest and running the machine with only 1 instead of all 4 sticks of memory, I could rule out the RAM. HD Audio drivers had been deactivated ages ago, tried disabling the onboard sound in bios, but to no avail. The crash persisted.
Sounds like a faulty PSU, right? Running some demanding game, heavy workload for the PC, suddenly the thing just cuts out. So Claire and I switched power supply units. And once again, my blackouts were gone for what must have been a week, I could play non-stop without issues, yet Claire didn't seem to have any problems with my old PSU, which we believed to be faulty.
Then Windows wouldn't boot up. Tons of bluescreen errors, instead. Faulty hardware. You don't say! After every ten or so failed bootup attempts, I'd actually get into Windows, but suddenly I was unable to access my savegames in Torchlight II and Paint would refuse to save edited image files, because it couldn't detect my hard drive. Which, incidentially, had begun showing S.M.A.R.T errors on the bootup screen. So the HDD was dying!
Eventually, the S.M.A.R.T warning disappeared, but the bluescreens got more and more frequent and then the blackouts came back, as well. As the proverbial last straw, I decided to try for a Windows 7 inplace upgrade installation. Ya know, install a fresh windows on top of your old one, back to factory settings, make sure it's not just a really nasty virus or some crap. But that's when my Windows died altogether and I could no longer boot it up. At all.
Thanks to some nifty tool called 'Parted Magic', I can still check on all of my data (or what's left of it), I've been able to backup most of my important stuff and judging by the many read and write errors I got when trying to access my windows drive, it's pretty safe to assume the thing is toast.
So now I gotta get myself a new hard drive. Which isn't as bad as having to buy a whole new machine, thank godzilla, but since hard drives don't grow on trees I gotta wait for some money. I've just finished a pile of articles and all, but chances are, the money won't be there before the end of next week - if that. And since stores in Nottingam charge at 50-100% more than Amazon, I'm gonna have to wait about another week until the new drive actually gets here. That's two weeks of sitting around without a working PC.
And getting a new HDD alone won't do anything. Reinstall Windows, from scratch. I know, not a big deal with Win 7 and all my important stuff being on "the cloud" and what not. But then I gotta re-download all my text and image editing software, KMplayer, 7zip, Fraps, FileZilla and a billion other programs you probably don't care to know about. Try and restore Windows Live Mail. Is there even a point to that, now that I can just import everything into Gmail and access it online? I'm used to live mail and all its predecessors and find gmail awkward and difficult to get used to, but storing stuff locally and failing to do backups is not the smartest way to handle stuff.
It's this stupid late 90s internet mindset. I don't trust companies that store my shit online. What if the guys hosting my favourite MMO lose my characters? What if my email provider loses my favourite letters? Back when I first got online, stuff like that actually *happened*! Ragnarok Online, for instance. Whoops, database problems, we had to roll back your toon to the state from four days ago, sorry!
Today, all those games, websites and services do something that I suck at: Create backups. My stuff is actually safer online. And easier to access. So... do I really still want Live Mail? Do I want to actually download all my email and store it locally and then lose it to hardware failure again? Do I even need all my email from half a decade ago?
I just hope that the new hard drive will put an end to all my pc problems. According to google, a faulty HHD can cause these crashes, black screens and everything. So can fucked RAM, GPUs and PSUs and I've ruled out each and everyone of them.
So what am I gonna do if I still get that black screen crap on the new drive? Only thing I haven't actually replaced is the motherboard. And I find it hard to believe that a defective motherboard would cause this kind of problem. A motherboard works or it's broken. It's not gonna make your machine run for a while, then crash it, then refuse to boot, then boot up again. Unless there's a hairline crack or some shit, which opens and closes as I reseat my gpu and memory whenever the damn thing stops running.
Still - I might be confusing cause and effect here. I cannot say for sure whether the defective hard drive is causing the crashes or whether the hard drive problems have been caused by the repeated hard crashes. Should the blackouts persist, I'm gonna have to replace the whole damn board. And since I won't go look for a second hand version of my old MSI P7N Platinum, I'll be looking at a brand new one, which will require a brand new CPU and compatible memory. If I go with something reasonably modern, I'll be looking at a bill of 350-400 Quid. Argh!
-Cat
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