Update (Patreon)

Hello, dear readers.

So, my PC died this morning. So much for ramping things up, eh?

By the looks of it, the PSU shed its mortal coils, and hopefully it didn't take any of the other components with it. I ordered a replacement, but it will only arrive on Friday, which means I'm out of a PC until the weekend. So yeah, not fun.

This means the next update is practically guaranteed to be late again. I won't apologize this time, since this situation is completely out of my control. In any case, I'll update you as soon as I can. Till then, stay safe, and have a less annoying week than mine.

Ciao.

[Edit: Update to the update. Turns out, it wasn't the PSU, but the ATX cable. Or to be more precise, one of the bloody pins on the mobo side,m which should be bloody impossible, but hey, I'm apparently the universe's chew toy today. 

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Okay, listen. I imagine not all of you are tech-savvy enough to know what the heck I'm talking about, so here's a brief explanation. An ATX port is where the motherboard gets its power. It's this twenty-four pin monster where each pin has its own little plastic box around it, and you literally can't put the connector into the socket the wrong way, and so the brass pins always fit perfectly into each other. There should be literally no way for one of those bloody things to be bent, yet when I moved the cable around, out it popped. I tried to put it back, and it didn't seem to fit, so I took a closer look with a flashlight, and lo and behold, one of the pins was standing at an angle.

I never touched this particular port until today, so the only reasonable explanation I have is that it's been like that ever since I bought the PC three years ago. What must have happened was, as I told you guys about it, I upgraded my PC a bit a couple of weeks back, and I think that while I was installing the new RAM sticks, I bumped the ATX port (it's right next to the memory slots), which caused this particular pin to no longer have a solid connection.

It would also explain how I've been having sporadic system crashes, and why my PC didn't start this morning. You see, I found that one of the wooden floor tiles near my bed was slightly out of alignment, so I stomped on it to get it back to its proper place. The tremor caused the ATX cable to move just a tiiiny little bit, which meant the pin was no longer connecting, and that tripped some kind of safety feature and the mobo refused to turn on, which made me think it was a PSU problem.

The solution? Tiny tweezers to very gently straighten the pin, and an imperious push to fully secure the connector into the port, and guess what? Instant boot, and no stability issues whatsoever.

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You know, some people say they have bad days. I know we are early into October, but so far, I'm having a bad month...