2012, and Dead Video Card
Nov. 20th, 2009 02:47 amAfter hearing about it quite a bit, I finally got a chance to see 2012. And, it was a lot better than I anticipated. I had to suspend all of my scientific knowledge and reasoning to avoid outright laughing at it when it tried to be science-y, and the beginning felt rather schizophrenic, but overall it was a pretty enjoyable movie, and that's what counts :-)
Upon returning home, I saw that both of my monitors were displayed pure scrambled signals, like nothing I'd ever seen before. I tried to blindly perform a clean shutdown (something I've had to do because of borked games), until I realized it wasn't responding to commands at all, at which point I just forced a hard reboot.
Long story short, my video card died. I knew it was acting a little off, and it was a somewhat cheap model, so it's not exactly surprising, but I definitely didn't want it to die like this. The GeForce 5 I stuck in to get it to boot can't even run my primary monitor at full resolution, let alone two of them, so I did have to order a new one, and it's on the way. I was rather annoyed that the only AGP cards on the market are either cheap crap or uber-awesomely-expensive with nothing in between, but since I don't play games on my desktop PC at this time, all I need is something that'll support my screen resolutions.
So, that was my fun today. I initially panicked about my computer, but I'm quite thankful it wasn't a more serious failure, and even more thankful that I'm already prepared to move my work between multiple PCs. All I had to do was pull my personal drive, and I'm good to go with Outlook and all my projects until my new video card arrives. I just really didn't want to spend $100 on computer parts right now :-\
Upon returning home, I saw that both of my monitors were displayed pure scrambled signals, like nothing I'd ever seen before. I tried to blindly perform a clean shutdown (something I've had to do because of borked games), until I realized it wasn't responding to commands at all, at which point I just forced a hard reboot.
Long story short, my video card died. I knew it was acting a little off, and it was a somewhat cheap model, so it's not exactly surprising, but I definitely didn't want it to die like this. The GeForce 5 I stuck in to get it to boot can't even run my primary monitor at full resolution, let alone two of them, so I did have to order a new one, and it's on the way. I was rather annoyed that the only AGP cards on the market are either cheap crap or uber-awesomely-expensive with nothing in between, but since I don't play games on my desktop PC at this time, all I need is something that'll support my screen resolutions.
So, that was my fun today. I initially panicked about my computer, but I'm quite thankful it wasn't a more serious failure, and even more thankful that I'm already prepared to move my work between multiple PCs. All I had to do was pull my personal drive, and I'm good to go with Outlook and all my projects until my new video card arrives. I just really didn't want to spend $100 on computer parts right now :-\