My gawd danged computer died. We’re talking motherboard failure. Yesterday the USB stopped working and I thought some driver had hosed things so I tried to roll back things back and uninstall and reinstall, all with no luck. Decided to flatten the machine and install Media Center Edition. I was going to do this today. In the meantime I was using a ps2 style keyboard and mouse, but the computer was working, just without my USB devices. Now I can accept that software problems happen and that reinstalling stuff is par for the course, but today I found the computer inexplicably turned off. Turned it on. Nothing. No bios, no nothing. Black screen. Tried re-seating cards and memory, unplugged everything, tried a different power supply, different video card. Nothing. Nada. The CPU fan only spins for about 15 seconds and the whole thing shuts off. Son of a beeeeaaatch!!

What in holy hell is going on here? How does a computer run for six months with no problems whatsoever and then suddenly die? I understand hard drives failing, but freaking motherboards? And I just went through this a few months ago with Bunny’s computer. I don’t know why I continually have problems with these damn things.

Maybe I’m building them incorrectly? But how could that be? It’s not rocket science and if I built it wrong, wouldn’t it not work initially?

So here’s my dilemma. Buy a new motherboard & CPU or buy a computer from Dell or somewhere. The thing is I have a bunch of big hard drives, a raid array, a DVD burner, etc.. If I buy a computer then I’m re-buying all these things. If I buy a new motherboard, will this happen again in six months? If it does I’m going to go out into my driveway, put the hummer into neutral, run around back of it, lie down, and let it run over me.

I know some of you are laughing your asses off right now. Have at it. I’ll join you in about, oh, ten years. Till then I’ll be mumbling curses under my breath without making eye contact with anyone.