A few months ago, my old IBM PC (an Aptiva, actually) finally gave up the ghost, as its power button and/or supply decided to no longer work, after 5+ years of service to me. I had a couple of weeks where all I had was a laptop from work, but eventually got a new case, processor, power supply, moved hard drive, dvd-rom, decoder card, etc all into the new case, downloaded all the dang drivers (because Micro Center didn't bother to give me the CD-ROM that went with the motherboard, and all of the audio/video is built into the board) and got everything working. And everything was fine. Still running Win98SE, it did need the occasional reboot to free up the 256 MB of RAM, because Windows is still a bloated RAM hog no matter how much you throw at it. And everything was fine. Until yesterday.
Yesterday it flashed a few blue screens at me. BSODs. No problem, I hit the reset button, and nothing happened. Nothing on the screen at all. It sounded like it was trying to reboot but I couldn't tell. I reached to the back of the unit, where I hadn't really reached in 3 months, flicked off the main switch, flicked it back on, and turned on the power from the front. The BIOS started making strange noises, and still nothing on the monitor. In the Mac world we've had names for these things, whether the Mac was using an older Motorola 68000 series CPU or a newer PowerPC, and that was a "Chime of Death." That's certainly what this sounded like.
I tried it again. Same notes. Not good. Gave it a while to cool off, and tried again, and still, the same beeps. Much later I turned it on and it came on fine. Ran scandisk. Ran scandisk AND the surface scan. Nothing much. Tried to start Windows. It said it just found my scanner for the first time (which is odd, I'd had it on both the old and new case for ages). Got that software setup. Started running ...tried to get to e-mail or anything else I need....BSOD. Not good. Ran scandisk again. Minor glitch, no biggie.
So I went over to Micro Center. It's been just over 90 days (more like 100 or so) since I bought the case/motherboard, but that's just the wrong side of the 90 day warranty, so it'll be $75 to test it. No exceptions.
I found out from my brother that the Global (or at least what used to be called Global) Outlet store charges $40 to put a PC up on a bench for such diagnostics.
Came home and tried it again, after it'd been off for oh, 18 hours or so, and it started up, and even started Windows, but is now restarting randomly....
I'll have to take it in, and I'll be without everything except e-mail (which I can do via the web) for a few days. I don't have that laptop as a backup anymore, because I don't work for those people anymore either....
I'm really getting sick and tired of these things. I wish I had a Mac again :P
See you when/if I get it back.