Digital Lamentations

Just before Christmas ‘06 I decided it was time to upgrade my computer. The machine was starting to become unstable while playing some of the newer video games. I was looking for a machine that could handle those and some intense processing work, such as encoding video files. I looked around for a while and picked out the hardware I wanted. I went to a local shop called Pyramid Computers and bought a new case, motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card. These were the vital components I felt I needed to upgrade.

I brought everything home and quickly put it all together. I was ready for a few configuration headaches, so I didn’t sweat anything when nothing worked the first time. I tried again, and again, and again. Finally I gave up for the night. I spent most of that weekend and several software installs before the system was finally up and running.

The aftermath wasn’t pretty. When I looked back at everything I did, I was left with three dead hard drives and not a single piece of hardware from the original system. At least I had a powerful and stable machine, right? Wrong.

Nearly immediately, the crashing began. It started during certain gaming sessions. I would be playing EVE, or City of Heroes, and then BLAM! The black screen would appear and my system would reboot. Of course I thought the problem was my video card. So the testing began.

Much time and effort was spent on forums and downloading new drivers. In the end, benchmarks and hardware tests were run and no errors were found. That’s when the real troubles began. The computer began restarting when I wasn’t in games. First it was during video encodes, and then when I was watching movies, and finally, when I was doing nothing at all.

So my computer-centric brain has settled on the thought that the problem lies in either my RAM (most likely) or the CPU. I could test these things quite easily. I even have the software to test the RAM. But something has happened over the past few months of problems. I stopped caring.

I disabled my internet access recently. I stopped playing video games. When I go home, I don’t want to touch the computer, let alone troubleshoot its seemingly endless hardware problems. I’m just burnt out. I have no dillusions that I’ll stay this way forever, but for the moment, I couldn’t care less if my computer works tonight or ever. My only guilt in all this is the wasted money invested in a new system. I guess that’s the way these things go, though. Given time, you get bored of everything, right?