Saturday morning, I woke up early and made the trip over to Micro Center again, this time to replace the motherboard. I got the same model, as it is working in Kathy's computer and I really didn't think it was the cause of the short. I get home and take the time to install it.
One thing that interested me was the fact that it really didn't seem like it took a whole lot of effort for me to unplug everything, remove the old motherboard, put the new motherboard in, and plug everything back in. It's been a while since I've done it, but I breezed right through it like a pro. Maybe it's time to put the other two servers in the boxes that await them...
Anyway, I booted it up, and the short was clearly gone, as I got the post screen. Windows began to boot up, but right as it was about to get to the part when it would tell me to Ctrl+Alt+Del to boot up, it immediately shut down, just like the first time when the motherboard shorted out.
I was afraid I had just tanked another $150 by blowing another motherboard, but to my surprise the computer successfully turned on again. But again, right at the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen, it shut down.
Thinking that I had an incompatible setting in the BIOS, I set out to change the BIOS settings. I had a surprise waiting for me at the "PC Health" screen, though. The tempurature of the processor? One hundred and three degrees.
Celcius.
I immediately turned the machine off, not wanting to burn the processor to oblivion, which has already happened to me once. I did some quick inspection of the processor, and decided it was high time to get a new heatsink/fan combo. Back to Micro Center yet again...
What annoyed me about the new combo I got was the fact that I had to place something underneath the motherboard to screw it into, instead of snapping it into place like the old one. But perhaps that was for the better, as when I booted it up the next time, I got a nice and frosty 29 degrees Celcius on the processor.
The computer has worked perfectly since. I have my memory back in the dual channel slots and am getting no crashes, no blue screens, no nothing. Best of all, the graphics are extremely impressive. The framerates I had Friday evening were still extremely fast, and I have decided to keep my display at max resolution, 1920 by 1440.
What sucked about this is that the unplanned upgrade sucked about $700 from my credit card, which translates to about one paycheck's worth of debt at a time when I'm really just wanting to get everything paid off again. With vacation and Christmas (WTF! Already?!) coming soon, I'm just about ready to call it quits on the break-even point coming this year. Seems there's always something to push that back.
Although there's still some hope. For instance, I can win big again at blackjack at the casino in Niagara Falls.
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In California, truck license plates are 7 characters, all numbers except for one letter in either the second or the sixth position. Whenever that letter is an X, I get nerd snipped into treating it as a multiplication problem and solving it in my head.
we should have paid more attention to the cats who, for decades, put their bodies on the line to walk on keyboards and sit on laptops and prevent us from programming
Former 2 time world champion DogPlayingTetris becomes the first player to ever rollover the level counter in NES Tetris, performing what's known in the community as "Rebirth". Final score: 29,486,164, 4216 lines, level 347 (256 + 91)... all huge world records. #tetris
I'd also love a 6 hour layover overnight instead of taking the red eye I was going to take and be 7 hours later getting into Cleveland than I wanted, why do you ask? #airporthell
Why yes, I'd love to leave at 4:40 to get to the airport at 6:20 for an 8:20 flight that got delayed to 9:05 which is too late for my connection so now I'm on a 10:20 flight instead. Why do you ask? #airporthell
@shanselman Who at Microsoft do I have to bribe to fix ADO so that those of us on dark mode who copy/paste text from one task to another can do so without our friends on light mode seeing dark text on a dark background?
I updated the blog post with a statement from Revival. While I'm not particularly happy with Revival's decision, I understand their motives. It's just a shame that it was someone from Interplay that had to go and do this. "By games for gamers" my ass.
Damn, got another Tetris world record! This time in the arcade variant developed by Atari. 6,008,005 points, 5,386 lines, round 363. Be warned, it's nearly FIVE HOURS. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2131759212