Okay, so I wasn't there when the van started to smoke. My husband called me from church, it started smoking as he entered the parking lot. "You're going to have to come pick me up later," he tells me.
Great. Just great.
Then for the second time today the Compaq came out with the blue screen of death. It happens mostly when my youngest is using it. Though he's convinced it's not always the same thing that causes it, or brings it on or whatever. I know I've had it happen to me when I was using Firefox. Last time was when I tried to load the wonderfully crisp and clear high-definition trailer for the next Harry Potter movie in a resolution equal to the screen res. of my laptop. I got to see about 1/3 of it before it crashed.
:::::sigh::::: At least I'm not the car mechanic in this house, but I am the computer mechanic. I need to open the case and remove one of the RAM cards or chips or whatever they're called (some mechanic I am, huh?) and see how the computer works with only one. If it works and doesn't crash, then we switch. If it crashes right away, and consistently keeps doing that, I guess I've found the culprit, but no, it could be the chip or the (again with the I-don't-know-what-it's-called problem) place where the chip connects to the motherboard. So I need to move the same chip to the other seating or connector or whatever it's called and try it again, then for good measure I should try both connectors with the other chip just for the sake of knowing for sure. If it's one of the chips, which I dearly hope, I then go online and find out which exact kind of chip I need to buy to replace it, upgrading to twice as much RAM as possible, and my 5 year old Compaq will hopefully then be good as new (though I should really try to get rid of some of the dust inside it while I'm at it). If it's not the chip, then it's the motherboard and we get to have a bonfire in the back yard. No, not really, they can be toxic I guess, so it'll join it's older siblings in the computer graveyard in the basement, though I might take the hard drive out first.
We already have (shh!) more working computers in the house than the number of people who live here, and as we speak a cheap used laptop is slowly chugging its way here via parcel post, so I suppose we don't technically have to replace this computer right away, but we're going to have lots of fights over the remaining 2 computers that have sufficient system resources to run most of the programs we generally use. Sounds like we're going to have a lot of fun here in the next few weeks!
