Okay, so this wasn't actually bad luck as much as bad ventilation

Okay, so this wasn’t actually bad luck as much as bad ventilation

The computer in the library died yesterday. And by died, I mean well-and-thoroughly deader than a doornail, not the sort of coma that comes from a denial of service attack that killed gehenna on sunday (and came back and took the entire ~~electric lightwave~~ integra telecom network segment offline for about 9 hours on tuesday morning.) And when I got home and was confronted with a computer sitting there humming unhappily while the network and console indicator flickered in a sickly way -- a computer that refused to respond to anything except pulling the SGI1600SW and attaching a regular old LCD console to the box -- I figured that the video card had finally handbasketed and simply needed to be replaced.

So I pulled the machine open to replace the video card and was confronted with about half an inch of dust (and in our house, "dust" means "cat hair") plastered over every bit of the inside, including in and around the processor fan.)

Um, oops. The poor machine didn't even come back to life after I vacumned all of the dust out (it "came back to life" in that it booted, ran for about half an hour, then fell over dead again with a little alert box saying "serious error [ok]" that kept popping up until everything just froze up.)

Perhaps I should have started vacumning it more when we got our second and third cats?

Now I get to decide whether to

get a Mac Mini and a new display (~$900), then use Boot Camp to load Windows XP onto it for Framemaker and Civ 2, or
buy some windows laptop and, sigh, load Windows XP onto it so I don't have to deal with the new Windows LP (New! With added DRM! And you can't move the OS to another computer!) that, surprise!, all the new windows laptops are coming pre-crippled with, or
to just use the old Toshiba 8200 that we had lying around in the junkpile, and learn to live with the frenzied whirring of the little cooling fan whenever we do anything that requires any processor time.

This Space for Rent

Okay, so this wasn’t actually bad luck as much as bad ventilation