July 23, 2005

Time's Not On My Side...

You ever have a computer that you just know will have a hardware failure any day now? I've got one.

I bought this computer back when I was at Microsoft. It's an AMD Athlon 2600+, 1Gb RAM, a terabyte of HD space, and a Radeon 9200 All-In-Wonder. It's served me well, but I could feel the failure coming back when I bought my Radeon 9700 to replace a failing GeForce Ti200 and it kept causing the system to reboot. Even with a new power supply, this system could not handle that card.

Well, it's now rebooting itself at least once every three days. Given the "generic" nature of the Windows "Watson" error, I know the hardware is going to go.

So I'm currently in middle of the monotonous process of backing up mission-critical files to DVD. I've done seven DVD's today, and am midway through the eighth. What's scary is that I'm still in the same folder, and I'm only up to the P's.

Since my granddaughter is coming down for a month, I don't have the cash to replace it now. I won't be able to replace it until September.

Now it's the waiting game. Personally, I'm expecting it to fail on August 16, 2005. (Things like this are more "fun" when you draw a line in the sand.) If it does go, I'll be dark for a little while.

No comments: