Computers Suck

What a freaking disaster!

It all started out so well. I got up bright and early on a sunny Saturday morning to go to the computer show with Grump, Cableman, JustAGirl and Son-of-JustAGirl. My PC monitor is pretty shaky. (I have to smack it 4 or 5 times before the color works properly.) And I thought I’d see if I could pick up a cheap older model GeForce video card, so I can run the awesome new Call of Duty game when it comes out. I came home with a new GeForce FX 5200 and a cheap CD burner.

Before I even got home, the troubles started.

Pepperkat called me and said her PC was constantly rebooting itself. Oh great…virus…here we go… So, I tried fixing her PC. It was a mess. The registry was corrupted. Rebooting with XP setup diskettes to get into Recovery Console kept hanging up right at the point of pressing the “R” key. Disaster.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d be smart and install my new hardware. More bad news. The monitor kept going off like it was in power-save mode after a couple of minutes. So, I’d have to blindly power the machine down. Of course, I trashed XP. Grrrr.

For a break, Saturday night we went out to the movies. Saw Secondhand Lions (with the incredible ROTK trailer). The trailer was jaw-droppingly awesome. And the movie was pretty darned good, too. I especially liked the cartoonist who drew the pics for the grown up Walter (Haley Joel Osment’s character). You’ll know who it is without even waiting for his name in the credits…which is at the very end, by the way.

Before the movie, we had supper in the mall, and Whiny and I perused the used software at EB. We found used, half-priced versions of Neverwinter Nights and Freelancer. Of course, with the luck I had this weekend, NWN had a bad CD, and his hand-me-down monitor won’t run at a high enough resolution for Freelancer! Augh!!

So, I finally trundled off to bed at 1am with my PC barely back on its feet, Pepperkat’s PC dead, and a frustrated Whiny the Elder.

Thank God it’s Monday.