Throughout my life I have always had a knack for buying temperamental PC's. It's an underrated talent but one that I seem to excel at. I can't remember the last build that work flawlessly from the word "go" and even if one did it probably broke within a year like the rest of them. Why they all insist on committing electronic hara-kiri is a total mystery to me. When it comes to computers I'm definitely a minimalist, only installing the bare essentials (and a healthy splash of games, of course 
), never the junk that many people seem to plague their machines with. It never helps though; before too long the blue screens of death start appearing signalling the slow painful demise of that particularly piece of hardware. These aren't always fatal but even so it normally takes a few days out of my life fixing them up so it's just as inconvenient.
True to form my current PC decided that I had had a long enough run of mechanical good fortune and last Friday it rebelled and began to sulk in the corner. Basically, I was just updating my anti-virus software when it asked me a restart the computer for the effects to work. That I did, but when it got to the welcome screen the infamous blue screen of death appeared and after it had restarted again all I had was a black screen and an idling hard drive. It wasn't even loading into BIOS, so for the last few days I have been trying to fix the problem. Thankfully the hard drive was undamaged by this event (the thought of losing my photograph portfolio was unbearable!) so now that it is fully backed up I can really start fiddling around. My hardware knowledge is not outstanding not I've narrowed it down to 3 possible things: memory, CPU, and power unit. It may not be any of those things but I won't know until I test them. That's my afternoon gone.
It's particularly annoying from a gaming perspective as two of my most anticipated games of the next few months (Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War (see last journal entry for more details)) have both had to take a back seat until everything is fixed. And I was just starting to get into them too. I hate computers, and they hate me. 
Oh well, hopefully this will all be fixed soon. I'll let you know what happens.