Well, my computer died Saturday. My wife had just started using it (after I’d been hogging it all day, natch), when it suddenly just powered off. But it didn’t just power off, it also produced a hefty amount of that tell-tale scent, ozone. Mixed with something else… like maybe the scent of real smoke.

I’m hoping that it’s just the power supply, and that if I just replace that, maybe everything will be fine. But power supplies have a way of taking things with them sometimes if they go down hard. Also, some recent behavior has made me suspect that the mother board may not be quite up-to-par anymore, either. I may end up having to replace that as well. Perhaps I can salvage the CPU as well, though I’m sure that’s taken quite a beating too, as I was experiencing heating problems a month ago (solved with the purchase of a case fan with significantly more oomph!). Perhaps it’d be well to go with a more up-to-date motherboard/CPU combo… I don’t think I want to go 64-bit, though, as Shockwave Flash is known to have issues on 64-bit Linux systems. Guess I’ll be doing a little shopping soon.

I’ve been wanting to get a laptop, and maybe now I have a good excuse to get a basic, cheap, not-quite-modern-but-still-very-usable model; but lately Sara and the kids have been using the computer more and more, and I don’t want to deprive them of one. And if I had a laptop, I definitely wouldn’t be keen on letting the kids (four-year-old David in particular) go touching it and stuff.

Maybe if I can manage to get the desktop working again, with some semblance of reliability, with just a power supply replacement (fingers crossed!), I can transfer ownership of that to “the wife and kids,” and get myself a cheap laptop, and a wireless access point. That way, too, I can stop pacing my room back and forth when Sara or one of the kids is surfing noggin.com. 🙂