Grey-outs, brown-outs, black-outs… out.
20 May 2006I think my desktop-of-three-years is about to give up on me. The DVD drive appears to have stopped working, and the other day my 40GB volume unexpectedly powered down and the computer soft-reset, with the drive not working until I rebooted properly.
Then my computer apparently turned itself off a day or two later, and I was slightly concerned. Being a well-trained tech-monkey, the first thing I did was check power. I’d kicked it out… just.
It was actually still in the power socket, and looking loose enough that it’d probably been moved out over a period of several days. So it occured to me that maybe it was actually so close I could have nudged it that day my hard-drive failed and caused a brown out… which isn’t actually that implausible, if a tad improbable.
Perhaps it’s not just about to die. Perhaps that’s what actually happened… perhaps.
Meanwhile, the computer is still perfectly fast (and would be faster if I gutted and reinstalled Ubuntu) if a little shy on storage space. 40GB is becoming increasingly cramped (even with an additional 10GB drive dedicated to OS + applications), and hard drives are SO CHEAP these days. I’ll probably save up for a bit to get a 250GB drive and a DVD burner, and a new graphics card whilst I’m doing the computer shopping thing (there’s a computer fair at UNSW in two weeks but it was pretty meagre last time I went…).
The graphics card thing is mostly just so I’ve got video-out and a DVI connection. I’m sick of my LCD’s picture flickering/distorting because of the cheap VGA cable I’m using! Ah well. Sometime… I can never be bothered buying computer stuff anymore (unless it’s on eBay ;-)).