craptacular loss of power
Today sucked in so many ways:
* Not even 9AM, and Denise emails me to tell me that the big (new!) computer seems to have crashed. After exchanging a few more emails it seems that it lost power and won't power back on again. More on this catastrophe later.
* I get stuck having to work on M\$-Vista bugs because someone else is out. Jebus, I have a whole new appreciation for WinXP after having experienced Vista in all of its glory. The eye candy is gratuitously annoying. The 'enhanced' security is even more annoying (do you *really* *really* *really* want to download this file?), and the lack of consistancy in the UI is utterly attrocious & frustrating.
* My drive home took nearly 90 minutes because a cement truck, going in the opposite direction in I680 crashed and blocked several lanes of the freeway. Rubberneckers basically doubled my commute time.
So back to the computer fiasco. I get home, and start blindly swapping out components, but in the back of my head, my money is on the power supply. I swap out the RAM, no change. I swap the graphics card, no change. So at this point, its either the power supply, or the motherboard/CPU. I'm absolutely screwed if its the motherboard/CPU, so I swap out the power supply, and bingo, the system powers up and boots. Thinking that I'm out of the woods, and cable everthing back up, close the case, and proceed to log in. A minute later the entire system hangs (but doesn't loose power). I'm not sure WTF is going on. I hit reset, and don't even start X this time around. I figure I'll just get the latest updates installed, and then start X. While 'yum update' is running, I get a truly ugly Oops, and the system hangs again. At this point, I'm thinking that the flaky power supply fried something else when it died. I randomly pull two of the four 1GB memory modules, and boot again. I've now had a grand total of 39 minutes of uptime, so I'm hopeful that I've pulled the bad RAM. I'll run it through memtest86 tomorrow to confirm, and then get an RMA.
I really really can't take another day like this. Two more days until the holiday break. Just 2 more days until Death Valley.