Woe Is Me!

I’m going a slight WoW withdrawal at the moment as my PC is poorly.   After my last lot of night shifts I dragged my sleepy arse out of bed at midday, made myself a bucket of coffee and slumped bleary-eyed over my keyboard and logged into WoW.  My Mage promptly stumbled over a nearby mob which tried to take a chunk out of her so, chugging coffee like a good’un I started to cast a frostbolt.  At that point everything hung and then my graphics went haywire and WoW died (or maybe I killed it, it’s a bit hazy now).  Anyway I decided to reboot the PC and then logged back into WoW.  Whilst I was just running around all was well but as soon as I tried to cast, WoW hung again…and then my monitor went black.  Cursing roundly I rebooted again but the monitor stayed black.  After a lot of faffing about I bit the bullet a couple of days later and bought a new graphics card.   I installed the new card and TA-DA I could see things on my monitor when I wasn’t in safe mode.   Of course I logged straight into WoW and res’d my mage who had been waiting impatiently at the Spirit healer for several days.  I’m slightly ashamed to admit I felt quite guilty about that ^^

The following day I went to boot up the PC, hit the button at the front and….nothing.  I had left the side off (previous experience has taught me that if I’ve been firtling around inside, the side needs to stay off for at least 2 weeks as sods law means that as soon as I screw it back in place and put away my screwdrivers away I will need to removed the side again and firtle with something else within the hour!) and could see an LED lit on the motherboard so I knew there was power.  I switched it off at the back, waited for a few seconds, powered it back on then hit the button at the front and it booted it up.  I was hoping this was a one off but it isn’t.  Every time I shut down the PC when I want to power it up again I have to switch it off at the PSU before I can power it on at the front.  Sometimes that doesn’t work and I have to switch off at the PSU and leave it for several minutes before the power button at the fron will work.  In addition I’m getting an occasional message when it boots up that the CPU fan is running slowly or not running at all.  As the side is still off I can see that it is running and it looks to be going pretty fast to me!  Anyway the upshot is that I think my PSU is dying and was possibly the cause of the trouble with the old graphics card.  As I don’t want to throw more cash at it without being sure, I’ve taken my PC into a little computer shop in the village; they will be able to test out the PSU properly and see if it’s working correctly.  If it checks out OK hopefully they will be able to get to the root of the trouble.

My husband took the PC in for me on Tuesday as he had the day off but they won’t be able to have a good look at it until Thursday.  My only option at the moment is to use the kids’ PC.  It is so slow!  They are quite happy playing WoW on it.  Ewan mostly RPs in and around Goldshire so the fact that it maxes out at around 15 FPS doesn’t faze him in the slightest and Megan only dips into WoW very occasionally being more partial to creating dysfunctional families in the SIMS.  When I finished work this morning I logged in (I was going to say briefly but maybe not!) to make a titansteel bar and take Hulan round the 3 Lolrus dailies.  By the time I was flying to the 3rd daily I was questioning how much do I really want that fancy fishing pole.  It was a horrible laggy experience.  I’ve tried turning the video settings down in WoW on the kids’ PC but for some reason it doesn’t seem to save them.  I’m praying that I have my own PC back, running smoothly by the weekend.