anxiety

i had this sinking feeling as i was about to pull the processor out of the motherboard and swap it into the new one that maybe this was a mistake. maybe this is more trouble than it’s worth. maybe instead of taking apart a fully functional system i should just buy another case, processor, some ram, and call it two.

i HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE troubleshooting computer systems. but i hate even MORE sitting around while someone else troubleshoots it and i’m basically dead weight, so i had to try to do it myself.

i have no idea what’s wrong with it. swapped out the m/b, plugged it in, and nothing happened. no fans, no booting, no boot errors. nothing.

the power supply fan didn’t turn on.

the only things that DID happen were that a little red led on the m/b lit up when the power was on, and turned off when it was off. and if i laid my arm across the case frame while the power was on i got shocked slightly.

ryan didn’t.

my new motherboard is evil and it hates me. that must be it.

as far as i can tell, my ram is right-on, so that shouldn’t be it. we tried another power supply and it still wouldn’t turn on, even with nothing plugged in but the m/b, still not even fans. then we tried the first power supply on a different m/b and it DID work. so it’s probably my brand new motherboard.

wonderful.

brian has another power supply i can try, but i’m not convinced that will help. more than likely i get to try to return the m/b to newegg.

next step is probably to go reswap the m/bs and get my old system up and running. maybe tomorrow night. i think i’m going to bed.

i had some good writing bits today but i don’t care right now. i hate technology.

douglas adams has this to say on the subject of technology — ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’