I was in bed watching television about 1 a.m. last night with all the bedroom lights out. The only light on in the house was the floor lamp next my husband's computer desk in the other bedroom. Suddenly I heard the UPS at his computer start to screech. I jumped up to go silence the little screamer and found my husband sitting at his computer with a dark monitor. The floor lamp next to his desk was still on, though, so I knew the circuit breaker hadn't tripped. "The power must have gone out," he said. "I thought we had unplugged that lamp from the UPS." (At one point we had run out of outlets and plugged the lamp into the power strip on the UPS, but I changed that last year.)"The power's not off," I replied, " my TV's still playing."
"Then I guess my computer's power supply just died."
OH NO! (Small pause for panic.)
When the computer went off suddenly, it evidently caused a surge that triggered the UPS. I reset it and he tried to restart the computer. Dead as 4 o'clock. Oh, well, he said, we'll have to look at it in the morning.
This morning, he determined that indeed, the power supply had gone crispy and he has to buy another one. Good luck finding one in town. Looks like we'll have to mail order it. That means no computer for him for a week (he hates trying to squint at my laptop screen - he has a 28" monitor). So I still have the wireless network but can't print anything - his computer was the printer server.
He was meaning to rebuild his computer this spring, but hadn't selected all the parts. Well, now he will have a new power supply for it, and a big one- he's thinking 600 watts. This will be the third power supply replacement in his current computer. His computer is a real workhorse and he runs the living daylights out of it. Photo manipulation and restoration, video rendering and heavy duty gaming, running dual processors and a hot rod video card. Most people can get by with the same computer for years. He bought me this Toshiba laptop two years ago to replace my Acer, but I really didn't need a new one. For what I do the old one was fine; he just thought it was a little weak. He normally builds a complete upgrade every 2 to 2 1/2 years and by the time he does, he really needs to.
If you hear someone moaning and whimpering in my neighborhood, it's him. He's in withdrawal.
2 comments:
oh it's always so sad when the puters die............ poor guy.
My sympathy. At least he knows what to do, what went wrong and what he wants. If that was me you might have to put me in an institution.
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