Yesterday my home computer gave up the ghost. Nothing was lost, the hard drive is intact (whew!) but the motherboard is dead. I got an USB Flash memory stick from the office so I could transport the work when necessary. The stick worked fine in the office computer, so I loaded it up to take my files home.

After I had done all the important stuff, I decided to empty the memory stick. Plugged in the cable, everything works. Plugged in the stick, Windows is looking for the driver. Fine, fine. Blue screen of death, begin physical memory dump... What! This is not how it's supposed to go!

So I waited until it had dumped it's memory (wonder where?) and tried to boot it up again. Nope, it says, gimme a boot disk. Silly machine you've already got one, but I'll humor you. After some rummaging I found an old DOS floppy. Let's see now. Nope, it says, gimme a boot disk. Hmmm. Something's fishy. Booted it up again and peeked into BIOS* setup. Well, well, well, if you don't even know that you've got two hard drives, CD-ROM and a floppy drive, no wonder you are asking for a boot disk. There was nothing left to do but shut it down and go to bed.

The moral of the story: don't plug new cutting edge devices into your old and crappy motherboard.

It's not a tragedy because I was thinking of upgrading the PC soonish anyway. But it hinders my work on the client's website and it's an unexpected expense. Oh well, there's time for everything and apparently it's time to upgrade now. Luckily I don't need to buy an entire system, only a box, motherboard, processor and memory.

Due to circumstances beyond me, the departure date has been pushed to 17th of February instead of 6th. More time to pack and get everything sorted out.

* BIOS is where all the lowest level data is about the hardware. Without it nothing works.