{"id":1166,"date":"2013-01-24T23:50:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T04:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1166"},"modified":"2014-01-30T07:29:08","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T12:29:08","slug":"desktop-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1166","title":{"rendered":"Desktop Died"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Came home tonight to find my desktop had died :( <\/p>\n<p>No response from pressing the power button: no beeps, no fans, no lights. I can&#8217;t remember what the output on the motherboard power connector is supposed to be, but there are 2 pins at 5V which sounds about right, leading me to think that the power supply may be ok but the motherboard is dead. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a real piss-off and bad timing on a number of fronts: I had just done a whole bunch of catching-up on bookkeeping and what-not over Christmas&#8230; and haven&#8217;t backed up since. I cracked a tooth 2 weeks ago, which is going to cost about $500 out-of-pocket to fix (over $1000 if insurance won&#8217;t kick in for it), and my cat racked up hundreds of dollars in vet bills in the late fall, so I just don&#8217;t need another major expense like this right now. Work has been crazy busy this lately, and will continue to be for the next two &#8212; I just don&#8217;t have time to deal with this right now. Plus, it&#8217;s frickin cold out, which means it&#8217;s static-y and just not the best time to go building a new system.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I have some options: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I can try to find a motherboard that will take a Phenom (now a ~4 year old processor) and see if I can rebuild it replacing only the motherboard. It&#8217;ll likely cost around $100 for the MB (<i>if I can find one<\/i>). There&#8217;s a chance other components were taken down with the MB, leading to either paying a lot to rebuild a computer with 4-year-old parts, or a waste of money on the MB. Even if the MB is the only part I need to replace, I might still have to spend a lot of time on a full reinstall if Windows ends up not liking the replacement.<\/li>\n<li>I can build a new computer trying to keep as many <em>likely <\/em>good parts as possible: new MB, processor, and RAM, but old video card, power supply, case, drives. I think this is a decent compromise between cost and likelihood of success. I&#8217;d almost certainly have to reinstall Windows from scratch (maybe finally time to move on from XP), which is another timesink.<\/li>\n<li>I can just buy a whole new system, likely pre-built in that case: getting all the parts and assembling it may not be cost effective &#8212; it has been in the past, to be sure, but I just priced out a Dell XPS for ~$800, and I don&#8217;t know if I can do much better than that piecemeal without waiting for Black Friday or Boxing Day to come around again. The downside (aside from the cost) is that they don&#8217;t seem to offer Windows 7 any more, and I&#8217;m too old to deal with this Windows 8 start screen app nonsense. Plus, as much as I love my Dell laptop, I find their desktops always end up developing rattles.<\/li>\n<li>I can set up my current fairly decent laptop to run the nice monitors and effectively turn it into a desktop. That strands all my data (and I just updated quicken and got all my tax spreadsheets together&#8230; without external backups!) and while my 2-year-old laptop is almost as powerful as my 4-year-old desktop, it just seems too weird to me to be on a laptop all the time. Plus it would deprive the cat of her favourite heated napping place. But, it&#8217;s free.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Not sure what to do now. I&#8217;m also pissed off at the stupid thing: I <em>liked <\/em>that desktop, and I only built it like 4 years ago. It should last longer than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Came home tonight to find my desktop had died :( No response from pressing the power button: no beeps, no fans, no lights. I can&#8217;t remember what the output on the motherboard power connector is supposed to be, but there are 2 pins at 5V which sounds about right, leading me to think that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}