Ashes

Hardware bad luck

19 Jul 2011, 10:22PM

So I've had a little bad luck with hardware recently. First the hard drive on the webserver died on me. I had to rebuild which is simply time consuming and painful when there are other, better, things to do. Secondly my graphics card on my PC died. Now you'd think, thats bareable as the motherboard has an on board on which would suffice. But barely. It allowed me to run windows but Visual Studio and any web browser were simply painful. I hadn't realised how reliant Windows has become on the graphics card now. Visual Studio couldn't keep up with me typing as it kept trying to redraw the window and scrolling in a browser was jerky and stuttering. Added to this I removed my ergonomic mouse to use elsewhere and put in a temporary one for a few days.

Enough. I couldn't stand it. I've bought a new mouse and a cheap graphics card and its awesome. We're back in business. The computer works again, I can type in VS and browse the web again without wanting to hit my head against a brick wall. The on-board graphics card was scoring a 2.0 in the windows experience thingie. The new one ($111 worth) scores a 4.8 which is acceptable. The old one I had was maybe 5.8 which was good. Still the only difference there is probably for games. Happy that at least my PC is working as I don't play games that often.

So who knows what happened to the old one. Its dead to me now, but at least I can enjoy coding again...