More computer misery, this time fatal

My desktop’s motherboard died in its sleep last night.

I was able to get our IT guy at work on the phone this morning—he’s there before 6 most days—and he taught me about do-it-yourself drive enclosures, so with a quick trip to GigaParts I was able to rescue everything onto my laptop and an external drive.  Thanks for your on-the-spot help, Tommy.  I really appreciate it.

I try to stay with a long cycle on desktops.  Generally I buy one, double the RAM three years later, and replace it three years after that.  It was getting to be time to replace this one, but I had hoped to put it off until at least the first of the year, and perhaps even spring.

However, sometimes things do not go as planned.

I bought a $499 off-the-rack box today that ought to be a fine children’s computer in a year or two, at which point I’ll jump back into my considered, longstanding process and customize exactly what I want.

I’m trying hard to make friends with Windows Vista.  So far the only casualties are Palm, which has decided that a Palm Desktop that works with 64-bit Vista is not a good thing to do; and my scanner, for which Canon has decided the same thing on a driver.  I can move to my laptop to sync my PDA, and I’ll see about hanging the scanner off the Mac Cube for now.

And shame on both Palm and Canon for not taking care of their customers.  Both of you rest assured that I’ll remember tonight’s misery when I’m again in the market for your respective offerings.

Back to the reconstruction.

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