Windows Vista
By "Vista" Microsoft seems to have been referring to the glowing brimstone fields of Hell, but I may be jumping to conclusions...
As my calloused blood and dirt stained hands type this blog, my computer sits, churing through the first of it's 250 GB-worth ScanDisk operations. Don't fret, I haven't lost any data (that I know of, so far), but I'm nervous and I'm taking precautions.
You see, today I'm down 1 and 6/8ths power supplies. 6/8ths, you ask? Well, one of them lost all of it's magic smoke, so it's definitely a gonner. But the other is newer, and I think it runs on pixie blood, which as we all know comes in little crystalized pellets, so it can't get out like the magic smoke can... but it can apparently go stale, 'cause that PSU isn't working either, and nothing got out of it as far as I know.
But what does all this have to do with Vista? Well, therein lies the rub: I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the day after I installed Vista my computer decided it was time to start igniting parts of itself. Maybe the "Deep Sleep" power saving mode of Vista really is Deep Sleep and this kind of ir-reversable shut-down state is the intended result. But there was some strange, possibly coincidental voodoo at work that made damn sure that after Vista tucked my computer in, it wasn't going to be getting up any time soon.
I wouldn't normally blame a piece of software (even from M$) for catastropic hardware failure, but we are talking about a sub-one-year-old 580 watt, top-of-the-line, modular power supply here, and we are talking about Vista.
The good news is, I'm enough of a geek to have had not one, but two spare PSUs lying around. Of course, my computer is limping along at 300W right now, but it should be enough to hold me over until a replacement arrives in the mail.
The question I'm grappling with is: What PSU do I replace the 580W one with? It's under warrenty, so I could get a replacement. But of course, if the PSU failed on its own after less than a year, I think it's time to switch brands. Then again, if Vista really did contribute to this atrocity I'd have to go wiping everything down and re-installing XP Pro. After the marathon of installing Vista, I'm not keen to downgrade unless I can find some real evidence that Vista sucks like hardware-killing bad.
Seriously: I think I'm about one really bad PC failure away from switching to a Mac. That makes ya think.
