Major Bummer!

No political commentary today. My worst nightmare happened last night. My Alienware Area 51 gaming computer broke down. I won that thing last December. It's pretty high speed and pricey. I do nearly all my computer stuff on that machine. So, I'm online playing Aces High and the computer just stops, just like if the power goes out. Except the power isn't out. I even unplug it from the UPS and try a different power source. It won't start. The power light goes on but no noise, no nothing. What am I going to do now???

So I get up this morning after sleeping in, since I'm not going to be able to go about my usual routine which involves between three to four hours of computer work. My old E-machines 600mhz is still working but becoming a real pain so I figure I'll try to get it up to speed to replace my Alienware until I can get it fixed. Naturally I don't have things backed up like I should have but I figure I did better than most people.

To make things worse, I'd cancelled my dial up account with Humboldt Internet the day before, to be effective today. I figure one of the first things I'll do is hook the DSL up to my E-machine. When I go to do that I realize the E-machine doesn't have an ethernet adapter so I can't hook up DSL. Luckily, even though my Humboldt Internet account was changed to mail forwarding only, I find I can still dial up and get online. Don't know how long that will last or if they're charging me by the hour for connecting. I need to call them and find out. At least I was able to send some e-mails out to get help. No one's responded yet, though. Why do things like this always happen on the weekends?

Lucky, also, that I had backed up some of my stuff a few months ago and was surprised how current some of my backups seemed. But, the vast majority of things I depend upon, like my address book, are locked away in the hard drive. If I can get one of the two people I e-mailed to help, I'm gonna see if it's possible, assuming I can't get the computer fixed fairly soon, to take the hard drive out of the good computer and trade it with the one on this computer. Then I should have everything set up like I did on the good computer except for all the kinks, slow dial up and slow processor that this one has.

This is driving me nuts as it hurts my wrists and arms to type on this computer. I'm thinking of moving this one over to the other table where I'm more comfortable. I also don't like this old fifteen inch monitor, but that's the least of my worries right now.

So, the thing's running just fine and then just stops. I know little about hardware but I suspect it might be a cpu blowout, or some such. I figure if it was the hard drive, the thing would still boot up. Does that make sense to any of you? If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.