I Fried My Motherboard

Yup, that's right. I knew I should have replaced the processor fan, but noooooooooooooooooo. It was actually faulty for nearly a year, so maybe I just had a deathwish for the computer all along.

I have three computers at home. One is a laptop, a Fujitsu, that my daughter uses. I purchased it at first for my 3 year old grandchild, who is rather proficient on the little tykes' sites, such as PBSKIDS, NOGGIN, etc. However, he still liked to spit on the keyboard, and while that is not a problem with the PC keyboard, it was a major problem with the laptop. So, my daughter and my grandchild switched out computers. The other PC is a quick put-together with a Pentium 4 processor operating at 2 gigs, with 256 k of RAM. It was a cheapie that cost around $300 to build. (My friend actually put together about 10 of these models and sold them for $300 to $350 apiece, just around the time, a few years back, when PC's were dropping drastically in price).

My pride and joy, however, is the "super computer" my friend and I put together back in early 2002. That's the one that I fried the motherboard. That has an AMD Athalon processor, only 1 gig, but I also had a gig of RAM, so it was a fast mother fucker. I am not totally 100% certain it's fried, but when the fire alarm in your computer goes off, things are not good!

So, I was dealing witht the worst case scenario here. Four years is an awfully long time for one PC to be operating efficiently and effectively, and my computer has certainly stood up well these past years. So, upgrading is a possibility. After all, it's just a motherboard, and all I would have to upgrade would be the memory, since my current puter uses SD and I'm sure a new board would use DDR. However, my tech friend has the exact same motherboard on a puter just sitting somewhere, unused, so there is the possibility of just replacing it for the same, and using the same memory chips. No upgrade, but possibly another four years of usage. About all I ever have had to change has been hardware. I'm on my third hardrive, and instead of replacing this last one, I just put in a second hard drive. I have a decent tower, an Antec, with lots of room inside. It is probably time, though, to upgrade the rewritable CD drive and the DVD player.

What I love most about the computer is the sound system. A Soundblaster card, 5.0 surround sound speakers with bass, and it beats out my regular home stereo system! Plus, I have nearly 10,000 MP3 song titles on the hard drive (about 30 gigs worth). I'll miss my music the most until I get the puter fixed. Granted, I have most of the songs backed up on disc, but having the sound come out of these dinky speakers is not worth the hastle to insert the disc.

So, there will be sporadic posting until after Thursday, when I should be able to put in the new motherboard and see if it solves the problem, or if it will require me purchasing a new and different kind of motherboard.