*grumbles*

You know, just ONCE, I’d like technology to work. The third replacement video card Dell sent me finally blew out tonight, but this time it pulled the entire motherboard down with it. Yeah, nothing like that lovely burning smell to solidify the sudden “Oh Shit” feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a spare NVidia GeForce 260 GTX kicking around, so I replaced the burned out card, but the computer booted up realllly slowllly. Eventually the monitor came on, but after a subsequent reboot, nothing.

My warranty runs out in May, so Dell is sending me a new motherboard and a new video card. (both probably refurbs, of course). I dunno. I’ve had nothing but issues with this thing since I bought it almost 3 years ago – and considering it was over $4000, I’m feeling a tad ripped off. Think I’m just gonna build one of my own at this point. Bare minimum, I’m going to snag a new hard drive and install Windows 7 on it and see if that’s any more stable than the PoS OS known as Vista.

And thank God for DropBox – since that’s where all my writing is. I have, thankfully, lost none of the really important stuff, though it may be a few days before I can access my POPped emails with certain details that I require.