twist of fait accomplis

For quite a while now, my computer at home's been giving me some serious headaches. It would blue screen on me every few days. But in the last few weeks, there have been days where it's blue screened five or six times. And the worst thing is that it was impossible to diagnose. It was a different driver every time, sometimes video, sometimes audio, sometimes USB/Firewire-related, sometimes memory-related... I could be nowhere near the computer while it sat idle and it would crash. Totally unpredictable and unable to be recreated.

Yesterday, Huyen was using the computer and it had one of its crashes. She left it on so I could see the error when I got home. But when I got home, the computer was off. The damn thing had died and wouldn't even power back on.

I am now in the process of getting a quote from Envision, who built me a kick ass computer for my studio a year ago. It's going to be a slightly-more-than-bare-bones computer. I'll be reusing my CD and DVD burners, sound card (maybe), memory (if possible), monitor, keyboard, mouse, router, XP license, speakers, and modem. I'll be getting a new case, motherboard, video card, firewire/USB, network card, and CPU.

Last night without e-mail was hard. I realized that e-mail is like an appendage for me. I'll check e-mail between commercials, on the way to or from the bathroom, while I've got water boiling... I didn't know what to do with myself last night.

It's going to be a long couple weeks between now and whenever the new beast gets built. I'll make the best of it, though. It'll be a good time to give the computer room a thorough cleaning in those hard-to-reach spots that are usually obscured by the monitor or case. And a couple weeks of waiting is worth it if I never have to see another win32k.sys or nv4_disp.dll crash again.