Yesterday, after what was apparently a long illness, my PC died… It was very inconvenient since I had work to do, but once again it was instructive and perhaps ultimately useful. For one thing it taught me that Windows is not very fault tolerant. Even in a crippled state, I could still boot Ubuntu, which helped me a great deal in diagnostics and research to fix the problem which ultimately turned out to be a faulty motherboard. I replaced the Mach Speed board with an ABit, which was the only one I could find at Microcenter which still supported the Athon XP 2800+ I’ve been using for almost two years now. Why stick with a now ancient CPU? Well, it just works and is quite good enough for what I do.
I realize now that my earlier rant against PC gaming was really the result of my failing motherboard. Nevertheless, I’m still glad I decided to do my Final Fantasy XI gaming on an Xbox 360 rather than stay on the PC. In the old days, I used games like Doom to benchmark my PC’s performance, but these days I have little patience for balky PCs when I want to play games. So today I’m catching up on work delayed by my PC’s temporary rigor mortis happy that having Ubuntu around as a spare has saved the day.