I'm not dead. That much is true. The reason that I've not been active on deviantART is that my computer's motherboard is fried. (more on that later)
I'm going to be getting a new motherboard (again... all of these computer problems I've had in the past year have been just sucking the money right out of me). This recent turn of events has, however, led me to the realization that my Socket A motherboards are very outdated. Sure, they can run just about any software that's out there right now, but the design is very limited speedwise, and most computer manufacturers are not making Socket A boards for that same reason. The computer parts that I am getting are a Socket 939 Gigabyte GA-K8U-939 board, and an Athlon 64 3200+. I've been trying to keep my spending down by staying away from fancy motherboards and 64 bit processors, but when you think about it, that's the main thing that is being manufactured, and will eventually become standard compared to your typical 32 bit processors right now. I'm thankful though, that I was able to get enough money for this motherboard due to my very very frugal (read: cheap) spending habits. Okay, now to the story about my fried motherboard.
Rewind to December 29, 2005. Or at least that's when I think it happened. On December 23, I had purchased and installed a
new harddrive in my computer. During that installation of the harddrive, I apparently had did some dipshit move of removing a stick of RAM while the power supply was still on. Modders beware: even if your computer is powered off, i.e. shut down, you still must unplug your computer. Normally I do this, but I forgot that time. When I had re-installed the RAM, my computer would not boot. The CPU fan would spin up, but my BIOS would not respond with a beep code or any indication of something was wrong. The computer merely stayed in an unreponsive state, with the video card not even initializing. Fearing that my computer was utterly doomed, I removed the RAM that I had forgotten to put back in earlier (I had discovered that my computer was only detecting half of the memory, so I looked and found that only one stick of RAM was in there), and my computer booted up fine! Now, back to the 29th. Deciding to give it one more shot, I put the "bad" stick of RAM back in the motherboard. I plugged it back in and powered it up. Immediately after I pressed the power button, the power light flashed for an extremely short moment and turned back off. My dad and I were stumped, so I removed the RAM once more and plugged it back in and pressed the power button. My computer would not boot.
Note: This contradicted the problem of bad RAM that I thought I was having earlier. A slew of troubleshooting steps took place next, including removing any peripherals from the motherboard, including the soundcard, video card, both HDD's, the DVD-ROM drive, and the memory. My computer made a single long beep (that was a good sign, because beep codes mean that the computer is aware of a problem)... however, that was our only luck, as from that point on, the computer was unreponsive, it merely started the CPU fan and stayed like that. Later that day, we went back to the old, infamous Chaintech 7NJL6 motherboard that I had in my computer from April to August. You may remember me bitching about it at one time. If you're interested, it's still unstable. Linux freezes on it too, so don't go saying "well, duh, windows suxkz". People who go around bashing Windows for no reason just... well... piss me off. It's not a bad OS. Anyhoo, my computer parts are back-ordered and should arrive before the end of the month. Until then, I'll use my mom's computer to occasionally check my dA account and my email. See you in two weeks!
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Four out of five people agree that my prints should be bought. The fifth one was shot.Best fractal artists evar!