The Perils of Geekdom

My geek pride has taken blows and boosts of equal measure this week.

Firstly, the blows. My PC just plain does not want to work. Over the last couple of months I have replaced the hard drives, PSU, motherboard and now CPU cooling unit. After replacing the HDDs, PSU and mobo, I thought I had the problem all sorted out. The computer was working fine (more or less - it was still a little flaky but I put that down to usually Windows instability). In the last two weeks it started randomly rebooting and not POSTing. I reapplied some thermal paste with the old stock cooler I had and it seemed to work - for a while. I then replaced the stock cooler with a shiny new Vantec one, but that only worked intermittently and now, not at all.

The beep code errors when it does POST have told me at various times that it's a heat issue, a bad RAM issue and a video card issue. I've got a new CPU on order (a Sempron 2500+, which is way better than my old Athlon XP 1800+) and I'm preparing myself for the possibility that I might need a new video card as well (I've got my eye on a model that retails for about $200 - we'll see). If I had known that all of these problems were going ot happen at once, I would have just sucked it in and bought a new bare bones system rather than do this piecemeal trying to minimise expenditure (because we didn't, and still don't, really have the money for this). Instead, I'll probably spend just as much and end up with a significantly inferior system.

On the upside, I've managed to get ADSL working on my wife's old Mac G4, without having any real idea of how to do it. I even managed to apply some of the telecommunications/networking stuff I learnt last semester at uni to set up a new ethernet connection. I've also discovered a new web browser in iCab, which is possibly the only OS9 browser still being actively maintained. It's not perfect, but it does have tabbed browsing. It doesn't work with our bank's online banking (which bank doesn't really give a rats about Mac users? Exactly), but I've downloaded an older version of Netscape Communicator that is apparently supported.

Geek pride at equilibrium. If the new CPU (which hopefully will arrive this week) doesn't work, it'll be sliding down pretty quickly.