It was a dramatic exit from this vale of tears... complete with the demon-shriek accompaniment of the fire alarm.

I used a towel to extinguish the thing. Old Pentium IV with inadequate fan = not good. So I've hauled my old 400mhz G4 out of the closet in order to get my nightly Web fix.

That's like my nightmare or something.

Yeah, it was very surprising. I'm glad it didn't happen in the middle of the night, though.

I guess I should have stopped leaving it on after the CPU started to halt due to thermal events (complete with strange warning tones coming from the speaker on the motherboard). What a piece of crap.

Well, at least it went out with a stylish Viking Funeral. I hope your HD was OK.

Active cooling is such a bitch. One day hopefully it'll be an unpleasant memory.

My computer keeps dropping off the net for some reason. The last time this happened, it was during an upload to Flickr, and necessitated the creation of a file on my desktop called shitfuckdamncock.txt.

Seems like it's bad computer season. I either have a file-eating virus or massive HDD failure in the cards on my desktop PC. Every time I turn it on, more and more .exes seem to report errors when opening. And my Linux partition has started exhibiting similar symptoms. I'm leaving it off until I can figure out the quicket way to back up what remains and see what I can salvage.

Strangest of all, the F8 key on my keyboard doesn't work when using the XP installation CD - F8 works find when I'm in Windows, but when I'm on the boot CD trying to do a system recovery, I have to press the "F8" key to accept the goddamn EULA, and it doesn't work. Bastard of the thing. Anyone know of a MSN / Yahoo compatible IM client for Linux that features all those funky smilies, for my wife? I'm seriously considering giving Windows the boot once and for all.

I had a monitor announce its demise by bursting into blue flames when I turned it on. It was a very convincing demonstration of my need for a new monitor.

I figured it would just stop working before literally going up in flames, that's quite remarkable. It went up like an interositor.

oh and yes, it is computer fuckup season - I just had my master harddrive deside to quit working, sort of. I had two incidences of the drive not being seen by the bios. I checked all the connections and tried it again, it booted and ran (slowly) for about 5 minutes then rebooted itself. I replaced the drive with one out of an emachines box that recently fried its power supply and mobo and put the old drive into a usb enclosure. It seems to work fine except for the loud noises coming from inside that seem to say "I'm going to blow up at any fucking time, man!" I assume it's on it's last legs.

I had something similar happen to a laptop drive recently. I started hearing the "clunk of death" occasionally as the hd head bonked repeatedly against the stops at the edges of the platter. This got worse until it wouldn't spin up at all. I stuck the drive in a $20 USB enclosure from CompUSA and, after letting it "rest" for a day or so, got it to spin up long enough to get the stuff off that I didn't have backed up elsewhere.

Desktop PCs are so fallible -- in terms of hardware and software -- that it's incredible we ever get anything done.

Exploding computes happen all the time in the movies, but I've only seen it happen once in the shop. It was quite satisfying: sparks and a lot of really stinky smoke. Die monster, die!

When I was at IBM I used to do support for Burger King. One night we had to send a tech out because one of the cash registers had caught on fire. When he got on site he opened up the old register to find a rat had created a nest in there before deciding to chew through the power supply.

Can't say I've eaten at BK since.