Haunted, then dead

There's been a death in my family. It's not like I should be surprised my computer died when I named it "Kenny" after Kenny McCormack. (Oh my god, they killed Kenny!) But it was still quite a blow to me. Kenny's been with me for amost 3 years, which is a long long time for me and one computer.

It started Friday night. I was playing a tournament and talking to KingLucky on the phone when I opened up Internet Explorer to check something, I can't remember what. Kenny just locked up and wouldn't respond to anything. That is very odd behavior for Kenny as he has been solid as a rock for a long time. I rebooted, rejoined my tourney after missing my big blind, and everything went normally. Saturday afternoon, my very next visit to the computer room after going to bed, saw Kenny with a blue screen. Kenny has never had a blue screen before. Reboot attempts were futile. He would get to the windows startup screen and freeze. Safe mode was no good. One time he booted up correctly but locked up. I was late for a tee time so I shut Kenny down by holding the power button for 5 seconds and took off for golf. Maybe the cool time will make Kenny feel better.

When I returned to Kenny, he was running, locked up during windows startup. "Weird, I thought I turned him off, I guess I forgot." I turned Kenny off again and went to bed. In the morning, Kenny was on again. I was on the way to go shopping with Mrs. DuggleBogey, so I shut Kenny off and left. When I returned from shopping, Kenny was on yet again. This time, though, there was no video at all. All my reboot attempts produced no video response. An old, yet still functioning, video card produced no difference. A different monitor produced the same results. Kenny was in fact DEAD.

So I ordered a replacement for Kenny. I probably could have spent a few days troubleshooting and would have started with a new motherboard, but it was so much easier to take a chunk of cash from my poker accounts and just buy a new complete system. A Compaq. My brother works for Compaq/HP/whatever they are called now, I think his original job was with Digital. So at least I am keeping it in the family. The other benefit is that my homemade machines tend to be LOUD and I hope this machine has some proprietary quietness that I never put much of a priority on until Mrs. DuggleBogey said it sounded like there was a jet airliner landing in the computer room.

So I am relegated to an old PC that Mrs. Dugglebogey used before she got a Compaq Laptop for school. How slow is the processor? At one point I had this computer in the living room and the CPU fan was making a funny noise so I removed it and figured if it overheated, so be it. It NEVER overheated so it doesn't require a CPU fan. If you remember those days, you know how slow this PC is. But it runs Party Poker well enough, and honestly, isn't that all a computer is for?