Back from the dead, sort of

Hmmm. My computer isn’t completely dead. I think. Maybe. But it’s not at all a well computer.

Yesterday evening, when I got home from work, I turned the computer on one last time, with everything but the mouse and keyboard disconnected. I wanted to make sure that it was really dead. Lo and behold, it came back up again. Even better, I was able to plug in my external drive, and write to my CD burner. This gave me the opportunity to do the following: backup, backup, backup, backup and backup. After a couple of hours, I had copied just about everything that I wanted.

After that, my friend Scott and I opened up the case, poked about a bit, and removed some extraneous dust. Then, I thought, what the heck, and hooked everything back up again. I started the computer. It died again. Yikes, part 2.

Suddenly, I had a rare flash of inspiration. (I last had one in about 2004.) I unplugged everything from the USB ports, and fired the computer up. Bing! It was working again!

The good news: it’s not my hard drive. The bad news: when plugging something into one of the USB ports causes the computer to die, it’s probably a bad thing. And there are some other signs of potentially lethal illness: my Thunderbird inbox still takes way too long to load, and my computer just seems a little sluggish, somehow.

This morning, I plugged in almost everything before starting the computer again, but left the top two USB ports empty. I started the computer, and it worked; I’m typing on it now. But I’m going to back up absolutely everything constantly, and operate under the assumption that it could die completely, forever, at any minute. It’s like working with a sword over your head.

According to the Globe, Christmas shopping in Alberta is a difficult experience. Not due to financial constraints: lots and lots of people are making all kinds of money. The problem is that it’s hard to spend it. There’s a labour shortage in Alberta, and they can’t find enough people to staff the stores during Christmas rush. It’s also difficult to find taxicabs, as there’s a shortage of drivers. Complaints about businesses are up by 30 percent over the last two years, as services of all kinds are affected by the lack of available people.

However, the Globe also reported that Ontario adults are still spending more at Christmas than their counterparts in Alberta: we’re at $1068 per grownup, whereas they’re coughing up a mere $1042. Sure, they have an oil boom – but we have credit cards, and we’re not afraid to use them.

Yikes

So I got home from work yesterday and figured that I’d spend a few minutes reading mail and surfing the web while I chowed down. But when I tried to start up my computer, it stalled. It got about three-quarters of the way through the “BIOS loading” message and then just stuck. Yow. I guess this means my computer is dead.

Specifically, I guess it means that my motherboard is dead. There were a couple of warning signs, which I hadn’t really connected into a coherent picture: my iPod was having trouble synching with iTunes, and my Inbox in Thunderbird was taking longer to load than normal the last couple of days. Or that may be a coincidence. I can’t tell.

Thankfully, most of my important files were backed up, and all of my MP3s are on my external drive, so this is just a royal pain, not a calamity. And large parts of my hard drive may very well still be functional, unless one of its crucial sectors died, or malevolent sprites decided to invade, or bit rot set in, or something. (I’m not all that technical any more.)

I am typing this on my old computer, which was manufactured in, roughly, the Bronze Age. I’ve gotten it functional – I’ve got Thunderbird and Firefox working, so I can access the net and send and receive email. But this sucker is antiquated. It’s only got two USB ports, and neither of them are USB 2.0, so I can’t plug in my external drive. And I can’t swap the hard drive from my recently-deceased computer into this one, as this computer’s motherboard isn’t built to handle disk drives larger than about 20GB or so – when it was manufactured, nobody envisioned that hard drives would get as big as they have. The largest hard drive available was something like 12GB.

The only major hassle I face is that I won’t be able to email some of my friends, unless they email me or I manage to successfully guess their email addresses. So if you don’t hear from me for a bit, I’m not ignoring you, honestly.

Here’s some random stuff to make today’s entry (hopefully) a bit more interesting:

• iFilm’s most popular videos of the year
• YouTube’s most popular of all time
• Retrolounge brings you the best of bygone eras!
• The Art Renewal Center is apparently “the largest online museum on the Internet” (which is redundant, when you think about it)
• The Victorian Web is a whole bunch of stuff about England (and elsewhere) in the time of Queen Victoria

Hi ho. Now it’s off to surf some sites for stores that sell computers. Hmmm… I’m working now, so maybe I can afford to buy something new…