Much as I enjoy camping, I don’t actually enjoy the “tent” bit of it. Sleeping on the floor and heaving myself up hurts more every time I do it. It was so good this morning to wake up in a bed and sit up and ease myself off and down.
I’d booked another day’s holiday from work today, and once the washing was out on the line I made some brekkie and then spent the morning watching DVDs – I was feeling lazy. And then I tripped over the broken PC monitor that I’d replaced yesterday. I heard a sound – a fuse had fallen out of it. That would explain why the thing had stopped working. The fuse was intact so I had this plan to put the fuse back and all should be fine. There was a minor problem – there was nowhere for this fuse to go. Clearly it had fallen out of the monitor, and clearly there was nowhere for it to have fallen from. For no adequately explained reason I then plugged the monitor in: common sense tells us it wouldn’t work. The fuse had fallen out. But it worked. So I put it back on to the PC. It worked fine. But slowly. Oh so slowly. The reason being that my graphics card had gone west yesterday. So I went round to PC World for a new graphics card.
I’d booked another day’s holiday from work today, and once the washing was out on the line I made some brekkie and then spent the morning watching DVDs – I was feeling lazy. And then I tripped over the broken PC monitor that I’d replaced yesterday. I heard a sound – a fuse had fallen out of it. That would explain why the thing had stopped working. The fuse was intact so I had this plan to put the fuse back and all should be fine. There was a minor problem – there was nowhere for this fuse to go. Clearly it had fallen out of the monitor, and clearly there was nowhere for it to have fallen from. For no adequately explained reason I then plugged the monitor in: common sense tells us it wouldn’t work. The fuse had fallen out. But it worked. So I put it back on to the PC. It worked fine. But slowly. Oh so slowly. The reason being that my graphics card had gone west yesterday. So I went round to PC World for a new graphics card.
The nice man was very helpful, and he advised I went for an all-singing, all dancing AZJ intranodalling accelerator card with JZB, advanced DLP and change out of forty quid. As I walked out of the shop the nice man said if I had any problems I should bring it and my PC back to him. But I smiled confidently – how hard could it be to stick a graphics card into a PC?
I took the card home, plugged it into the PC and nothing happened! So I took it all apart, tried again – and again nothing happened. So I took it all back to the shop and smiled sweetly at the nice man. He was very polite and patient and he couldn’t get it to work either. So he tried a different graphics card. And another one. He then had an idea and got out some diagnostic tools and fiddled about. And he found the problem. When we concluded yesterday that the graphics card was knacked, we hadn’t fully elucidated the extent of the problem. When the graphics card had gone bang, it had taken a sizeable chunk of the functional ability of the motherboard with it. I could either replace the motherboard, or for a few pence more I could replace the entire PC.
There’s no denying my old PC was on the way out. It was nearly five years old, and I’ve blogged several times about how knacked the poor thing was. Only the other day it had a serious Windows error. But for all that it was old, it’s got tons of data on it that I didn’t want to lose. So the chap in the shop called over one of their salesmen who suggested a rather nice replacement PC, and as part of the deal they would put my new graphics card into the new PC, and rig up the hard drive from my old PC as a stand-alone portable hard drive, and have it all done by closing time. In the morning I’d walked out of the shop with change from forty quid. This afternoon I walked out with change out of four hundred quid.
I went home, and had a bit of a tidy up. It’s amazing the difference putting books and DVDs onto shelves makes. And by the time I’d thrown out empty boxes and carrier bags I found I had quite a bit of space in my back room. And PC World’s word was good – I picked up my new all-singing all-dancing PC at 7.45pm. It all went together very well; the data from my old PC has been saved, and with just a little help (over two hours’ worth – cheers Chris!!) from my friends, we managed to rig up the Internet circuit and photograph mangling software.
There’s still some fiddling to be done with the device, but that will keep until the morning…..
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