okay, i went over to St. Fred‘s house the other day and came home with two anonymous desktop computers that used to be dedicated servers at a video game farm somewhere locally. they’re both intel processors around 800-900 MHz, and they both have about 128MB of RAM, and my computer whose hard disk fried has an AMD K6 1.5 GHz processor and 500MB of RAM, so i swapped the hard disks out (both of the “new” ones have maxtor 6.1GB drives), and combined that with the GEforce 5200 video card (with 256MB of vRAM!) that St. Fred gave me (!), and, once again, i have a rockin’ computer… except…

i just got dapper installed (the rest of them are on the hard disk that died), when there was this “beep” noise and my new/used 21″ monitor that i just bought a couple of months ago(!) turned off and won’t come back on. it just displays this colour bar with a message saying the monitor is working, but that there’s no signal, and recommends that i “activate by computer”. 8P i tried several different cables, and three different options for signal (the new GEforce, my old 64MB AGP/PCI video card and the onboard video that comes with the motherboard), but there’s “no signal” according to the monitor, which, to my way of thinking, means that something’s wrong with the monitor itself.

and in the middle of all that i got a call from one of my clients who, from what he was able to tell me (and he’s not particularly computer-literate), has got a dead hard disk himself, and wants me to come by and fix it for him. 8/

wonderful… another thing to deal with on top of everything else… 8/