Technology is Awesome! (Until it Stops Working...)

With considerable nervousness and despair, I found myself looking at the Black (rather than blue) screen of death when I returned to my computer this morning.

Are you feeling LUCKY?

Hoping that something had just glitched along the way... like a monitor cable coming loose... I checked all connections, and then restarted the box, feeling slightly apprehensive that the sound of the fan seemed a little more prominent than I remembered.

That sense of apprehension only ramped up as that whole startup routine took longer, and longer, and longer.

And then... everything came back on. Sort of. Not exactly.

The screen looked all wrong an "elongated" and a good bit of troubleshooting later, I was able to confirm that my graphics card was basically toast. The reason I could even see anything was that my system had reverted to running video in Windows "Safe mode."

This is NOT Good News...

Now, my computer is older than dirt by most measures, so I can't really complain too much.

But still... a new computer is an expense I can ill afford, at this time when we can ill afford anything.

I already threw about $300 at it a couple of years back when things went haywire with my old "spinning" hard disk, and I replaced it with an SSD instead. But as my friends at the "nerd store" assured me... that was really just a band-aid fix.

Maybe a new (very basic — I'm not a gamer) graphics card wouldn't be that expensive, but there's also the question of when it becomes a waste of money to put new parts into a 10-year old box.

Not How They Used to Make Them?

Of course, then I started looking around at what it might cost to just replace the computer... given that I'm not using some budget off-the-shelf box from Wal-Mart. Most likely, I would be looking at $900-$1,200, thank you, come again.

I can't afford that. Not now, not later, and the way things are going, pretty much not ever.

And yet?

I depend on having a functioning computer to do my work. It's not really optional, when you're an online seller and blogger, and I am not about to attempt learning to do what I do on a smartphone!

As part of my brief search, what I found quite interesting was the huge number of reconditioned machines being sold by pretty much all the electronics outlets, from HP and Dell direct, to Office Depot and Best Buy.

Struck me as strange and noteworthy that the days of "oh, just buy a new one" have faded a bit into the background.

I don't have money for a new computer, and short of a dozen consecutive $100+ posts on Hive, I have no way of raising sufficient funds for a new "box."

Of course, one option is to buy something super basic "off the shelf," limp along for a while, and buy upgraded bits and pieces as I can afford to. But I am really just not a technologist...

More likely, I will just have to resort to hooking up a larger monitor and standard keyboard/mouse to my (also aging) laptop for a while and making do, that way.

Don't get me wrong... I love technology and it is awesome... until it stops working!

Thanks for reading, and a have a great remainder of your weekend!

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Created at 20220904 00:35 PDT
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