My worst fears have been realized: my brand new gaming PC is dead.
One of my roommates, in the throes of a head cold, decided to start trying to troubleshoot our furnace — by flicking off random switches in our circuit breaker. I was right in the middle of a game of Left 4 Dead when my machine went dead. It happens that the circuit box is just outside my room, so I got to look over and give my roommate a hard stare before yelling at him.
“Oh,” he sheepishly said. “I didn’t think…”
The weird thing was that my machine booted back up and I played for a while after that happened. The only strange symptom was that I had a little bit of a hard time pairing my wireless keyboard with its USB dongle on the PC. But I played for another hour or two before going to bed.
But when I turned the PC on in the morning to listen to some music while I worked on my laptop, something was awry. There were artifacts on the screen as it booted up, strange lines that went up and down through the start-up screens. And while I could hear the machine start into Vista, a few seconds after hearing the initial chimes that computer would reboot itself. That cycle would continue endlessly.
The day it died I seriously just about cried.
I loathe troubleshooting PCs. It’s not that it’s that difficult, but I don’t keep a whole lot of PC hardware on hand these days. That means I have to take a good guess as to what the problem may be — blown video card, power supply, or motherboard (in that order of likelihood) — and then order the individual parts, test
them, and then send back the ones I don’t need. It drives me mad — and I just don’t have time to deal with it right now.
But now I have to, because I still haven’t tested this machine running Norton, which was sort of the whole point.
My roommate offered to replace any parts he’d blown out. I think what I may do instead is ask him to fix the machine. Money is a factor, but what I lack more is time.
