One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things is not the same.
My computer has been a little flakey lately. It was crashing 3-4 times a day as opposed to the normal maybe once a week. I normally attribute problems to the my Audigy. While Creative was a quality brand in the past, there current track record (mostly with Vista) is less than steller. I only tend to have problems with it while playing newer video games, but before I do, it causes those games many headaches. So given the many recent crashes, I was all set to blame the sound card.
To be fair, it could have been anything. All my drivers, programs, and virus/adware stuff was up to date; nothing suspicious or new was running, all the connections inside and out on the computer were solid; and the computer did not seem to be running any hotter than normal. I just decided it was the sound card because it has cause more problems in games than anything else I am running, and normally just telling the game to use software rendering for sound instead of hardware fixes the problem. I think it was also wishful thinking, I could pull the sound card and still have a fully functional system without having to buy anything (I have on board sound, it just does not sound as good).
I just kinda pushed through and ignored it, as is my way, until something much more drastic happened. I noticed one of the capacitors on my video card seemed to have shifted. I seemed to remember it being inline with the rest of the caps, but I wasn't sure. With the only other viable video card we own sitting in Rook's computer 25-30 miles away, I just kept going, but I made sure to shut off the computer when unattended.
Now I have mentioned several times before about my lack of desire to upgrade certain pieces on my computer until I was ready to do a more massive upgrade. Those pieces are the motherboard, processor, ram, and video card. Most new motherboards anymore use DDR2 ram and use the PCI Express slot for video cards. Mine uses DDR and AGP, both of which are incompatible. So any upgrade would be made with out of date equipment, which means upgrading sooner the next time.
A very brief conversation with the wife—and by brief, I think I said two sentences and she responded something like, "Duh you are ordering a new system. That's a fire hazard."—and I was ordering a new computer. As for the upgrade, I cheated and used a guide from Toms Hardware so that I knew what would work together.
Within hours of ordering the new components, my capacitor spit at me. Now, I don't know what they pack capacitors with, so I don't know if it was the liquid electrolyte or the dialectric melted (ok, I know a lot about capacitors, I was a EE student) I don't really care, but I did promptly shut down my computer, and left it off.
That was Sunday, and Lightman is a poor substitute for a desktop computer.
