I guess hardware isn't so bad after all

Posted by Eric Stein - December 10, 2006 CE @ 04:08:11 UTC

It all began so suddenly on October 30. I'm reading a textbook on my bed before class and suddenly my computer reboots.

[11:04:18 2006-10-30] <+Toba> 11:04:18 up 22 min, 9 users, load average: 3.67, 2.86, 1.52
[11:04:42 2006-10-30] <+Toba> meh, it's just my desktop
[11:04:45 2006-10-30] <+Toba> but that was fracking weird

Little did I know that my UPS's battery failure was not just annoying, it was deadly to motherboards. I blithely continued watching season 4 of Stargate SG-1, thinking I'd solved the problem by replacing my power strip, heaven forbid my UPS could *cause* problems.

[23:58:16 2006-11-01] <+Toba|BSD> aghlaghalghalhglahlaghlagh

I'm pretty sure you can figure out what that means. Yeah, happened again, but this time the system won't boot at all. So I replaced my motherboard with a random one from my closet.

[15:33:41 2006-11-02] <+Toba> oh, and my cpu and ram being way slower
[15:33:52 2006-11-02] <+Toba> this is a good excuse to replace all my hardware

I didn't have any money to buy new stuff right away, so I kept on trucking...

[12:45:47 2006-11-04] <+Toba> diff motherboard
[12:45:53 2006-11-04] <+Toba> that is causing my system to randomly reboot
[12:45:59 2006-11-04] <+Toba> and underclocking my cpu and ram by a ton

Later, in reference to something Ken was doing:

[23:51:24 2006-11-04] <+Toba> a hard drive is about to get hammered

I continue to try to debug my hardware problems, oblivious to my approaching doom.

[16:34:08 2006-11-05] <+Toba> I just spent an 2.5 hours trying to fix this
[16:34:11 2006-11-05] <+Toba> and right after I boot
[16:34:14 2006-11-05] <+Toba> gnome dies

[23:15:00 2006-11-06] <+Toba> my taskbar is broken
[23:15:03 2006-11-06] <+Toba> but I can still alt tab

Failure

At about noon the next day my system crashed hard and corruped partition tables and superblocks on both drives. Grub couldn't find my kernel and Knoppix couldn't mount anything.

At this point, I still had no money and now no computer. My paycheck was still a ways off. So, I stumbled along with my laptop for a few weeks. By the way, said laptop's window manager killed itself violently when I used portupgrade, so I was using TWM. TWM sucks. TWM sucks more than you can possibly imagine. It's ugly, it has the bare minimum of functionality, and did I mention that it's ugly? Behold, how ugly it truly is:

twm is ugly