Caught in the Breakdown

Our desktop computer took a dive a few weeks back. The fact that it is still not fixed was an obvious symptom of my malaise over IT. It used to be that a sick computer in our house was made better in a matter of hours. I still have 3 "beige boxes" in the basement for spare parts. Lately, however, the last thing I wanted to do after a frustrating day at work was crack into another puzzle. Networks, VPN, firewalls, VoIP (Vonage), Wireless Access, etc. all started to get on my nerve. (Yes, just one nerve. The rest are reserved for the Things.)

So, Saturday was the "Prince Spaghetti Day" of fixing the computer. Picking around in the computer led me to believe one of my RAID-0 hard-drives was corrupt. I spent a few hours cruising around the city trying to find an inexpensive pair of hard-drives and settled on getting just on big one. The RAID-0 is not really getting used much and at this point I cannot afford $300 on hard-drives.

I get home, peel back the cover and get to work replacing the hard-drive. Experience taught me years ago to NEVER put things back together until AFTER the software is installed. Good thing I listened, it wasn't the hard-drive. It wasn't the video card, nor the RAM.

I really wanted to take our laptop to school. But, here I am 7 days away from my last pay-check (please, dear Lord, for just a few weeks) looking at replacing a processor or a mother board. AARGG.

Final answer, the laptop stays and the IT guy that has not been away from a keyboard for more than 2 days in the past 15 years will have to deal with addiction withdrawal.