My Winblows machine just went out, not with a whimper, but a bang.

I was tapping out a post for the ages, when I heard a loud noise, and viewed a suddenly black screen. I’m hoping that it’s the power supply. It’s got a fairly new motherboard, and if the motherboard went, there’s a good possibility that it took a lot of other expensive items with it, like processor, memory (the price of which has been through the roof lately), drives (particularly the kind that have a lot of valuable data on them, and haven’t been backed up lately), etc.

Fortunately, I had just emailed off my TechCentralStation column before disaster struck.

I’m posting this from my Linux server, which may become my main workstation until I can figure out what happened. I’ll get up and diagnose (and hopefully repair) it in the morning, and then be back to some semblance of regular posting, in between programming and other sundry activities.

In the meantime, go ye and read Lileks’ latest screed, in which he eviscerates yet another brainless misanthropic British columnist. It’s particularly apt in the context of the current international hatefest against technology and humanity going on in Johannesburg this week.

You’ll love the last line. I did.

[Update on Wednesday at 1:17 PM PDT]

As I suspected (and hoped) it was the power supply. I’m not entirely shocked–it was an old unit (an early ATX) and only rated at 250 watts. It was running a 1.2 GHz Duron, with two older (and hence probably less energy efficient) hard drives, and a case fan. It may be that it’s been on the edge for a while, and the accumulation of dirt on the fan blades, or just age, finally caused it to give up the ghost last night.

The problem is that, this morning, I swapped it out with a supply from another cannibalized computer. It lasted about fifteen minutes, then it failed too.

What to do? Was there something fundamentally wrong with the computer that was causing it to become power-supplyacidal? The supply I swapped out had no power rating on it, but had been running a K6-2 350 system.

I couldn’t think of any mechanism, short of simply overdriving it, that could cause a motherboard to kill a power supply, so I decided that it was worth risking another one, as long as it had adequate capacity. I found a 400 watter for twenty-five bucks. It’s been up for almost half an hour now. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

And no, I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the OS is irrelevant. I can’t blame Bill Gates for everything…