It was the sound of mating mice which alerted me to something wrong.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a rat infestation problem. What I did have sounded like a hard drive on its last legs, grinding out the reminder of its 1′s and 0′s as diligently as a half-dead piece of machinery could. A few minutes more, the operating system would finally play heed to its requiem and terminate the farce, freezing my machine in the middle of an online game.
It’s always in the middle of game.
Well, I hope it’s the hard drive which failed; the most mechanical and thus most err-prone component in a computer is also the easiest to diagnose, so with proper data backup, fixing it is just a matter of reinstalling Windows, my applications, games, and reimporting my settings. S’matter of fact, since I was going to upgrade my drives anyway, this makes for a convenient excuse.
Though I am a bit surprised at how losing my main PC turns out to be such a small inconvenience. Being a developer and a geek means that the PC is the central piece of hardware of everyday life: it holds my music, photos, movies and shows, games, chat, e-mail, internet, and work. Even two years ago, having something kill the machine meant driving 30 miles to the nearest Fry’s for replacement parts; getting it fixed was top priority. Nowadays, computers are still central to my life, but each of those functions available have split into their own dedicated machine(s):
- Most of my media is now on the Mac Mini, and I stream music wirelessly from the box.
- Email and simple web browsing are handled by the iPhone. Plays a bunch of decent games too.
- My work laptop obviously holds work-related stuff.
- The PS3 is for games, and a good amount of titles are released for both the PC and PS3 now.
With a low-end laptop able to cover all the other bases save one – hardcore gaming – there’s just less and less reason to keep around a loud and hot computing tower below my desk. It may very well be just pure nostalgia that’s prompting me to spend time and money fixing up this box; even my geekery (working on my own projects, playing around with Photoshop and web design, etc.) has fallen by the wayside, and I doubt I’ll ever have the time or incentive to restart those ventures anytime soon.
That is, I may be outgrowing my PC. <horror>