Gonads and Strife

Have you ever seen it? The little flash movie I'm referring to in the title of this post?

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/weeee.php


I think of this little clip everytime a catastrophe happens in my life. I dunno why, really...probably because it makes me laugh. And, you know, strife is kind of appropriate in times like these.

ANYway, on to the topic at hand:

Last night I was minding my own business, playing some WoW. I began to notice a very faint burning smell, which was noticeable enough to make me investigate around the house for the source. Finding nothing, I contributed it to it being the first time the central heating had been turned on. Probably dust in the ductwork making it's way out.

As the night wore on, the smell got considerably stronger. Soon, I noticed a light tinge of smoke near the ceiling, and was now clearly concerned. I went and turned off the heat just to be safe, and began looking around for the cause of the problem. I came back downstairs to find smoke pouring out of the back of my computer, which then immediately shut itself down. Good heavens!

So, after examining the situation, I came to the conclusion that the power supply had blown up. The smoke was coming from that box. Also, before the computer shut itself down, I noticed the temperature gauge read a very normal 97 degrees fahrenheit. Which means that the CPU itself didn't overheat -- good news.

I called the support department for me PC, only to have them tell me my warranty had expired. That didn't change the fact that I need to have the machine fixed, so I packaged up the tower and got it ready to send back to them. Later, after calming down and thinking for a bit, I distinctly remember extending my warranty to be a total of 3 years, which would mean that I have 1 year left. I still need to find my documentation on that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right and will hopefully not have to pay anything. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on that.

As I was on the phone with customer support, I was installing WoW on my backup PC, which is considerably older. Tonight I came to the conclusion that it will just flat out NOT run the game. It's too old.

Therefore, it's useless to me as a backup, and will be replaced with a new backup computer tomorrow. A vast majority of people will call this any number of adjectives, such as "stupid", "obsessive", etc, etc. Your opinion. It's not the way I see it. Look at it from my perspective:

I have a backup computer for a reason -- to use in the tragic circumstance where my main computer is temporarily out of commission. If said backup computer can't do the things I need it to do, then obviously I need to replace it. I can't think of anything more logical than that.

Besides that, if I ever decide to have another LAN party, I would obviously need a computer that can run the damn games. Otherwise it's kind of hard to do MULTI-PLAYER with ONE computer.

So I'm going shopping tomorrow. Whee!