So, there are levels of not-going-well for a week.
Missing my lecture because I got drenched, that wasn’t particularly good.
Having the alternator fail on my car, that wasn’t particularly good either.
Having the new drive arrive from Scan and singularly fail to work? That also didn’t fill me with joy.
Trey missing her riding lesson because of screwed up public transport, again not brilliant.
My PC deciding to let out the magic scent of burning silicon last night? That again wasn’t great.
The new powersupply sourced this morning (which meant that Trey had to take public transport to her lesson…) looked to have cured the problem. Indeed I was feeling somewhat ‘stupid’…
…see, it turned out that my poor little Athlon XP’d been running with a 300 Watt supply, not a 400 Watt supply which I was utterly convinced I’d bought.
At any rate, I bought a brand new 450 Watt supply from Maplin, put it in… and… the machine powered up. No more burning smells, funky chicken I thought and shut the case.
It sat at the login prompt. I hit log-in. Black-screen-kernel-dump-reboot-hideous burning smell.
I hit the power switch.
Shit.
Unplugged things, but now the machine wouldn’t come on even with no disks on board. John came round with another new supply (suspecting the 450Watt one of having been killed now) I switched it on. Nada. Nowt. No cheesey biscuits for you.
Having examined the motherboard; two capacitors have failed, and what I think was a voltage regulator has melted it’s solder and overheated. It’s dead.
Having examined the old 300 Watt supply, 2 of its capacitors have gone to capacitor heaven, leaking tasty brown capacitor goo all over the board.
So, on top of the new Alternator which I need (or will need soon) (not a fucking Valeo one this time either, no bloody way), I’ve had to buy a new PC Motherboard, processor (‘cos I don’t trust the one that’s in there now), memory (‘cos I don’t trust that either), and the new Powersupply (which I’m going to go and get swapped as DOA in a bit). Hopefully it’ll arrive (a) when I’m here and (b) soon, because I can’t work without it. Not properly. Also means I get to re-install the only just installed Windows XP… So, really, bollocks to it.
Now I need to eat food and go and see if I can fix my mum’s dead washing machine. ‘cos this week’s just going so swimmingly I feel the urge to fix more things.
Of course, the really scary thing is, one of the big reasons for getting the DVD+-R/RW drive was to backup the stuff on the 160Gig Hd, and now I don’t know if 4 years worth of photos have bitten the dust. And the good quality renders of the movies I’ve made with people, and so on. All I can do is test the drive in another machine before I put it back in… *sigh*
