Disaster! – The Climb #890

Saturday 31st July 2021

My PC decided to die. And by die, I mean it won’t even turn on.

I’ve had a few issues these last few weeks with random reboots. I’ll be playing a game and suddenly, the game will not only crash but the entire PC will reboot. It always seemed to be as I loaded into a new area on Warcraft or had a lot going on in Fortnite, so I reduced graphic settings to see if that would improve things.

But it started doing it when I was watching Youtube, or working in Word. And then today it crashed when I was writing The Climb. There was nothing in the Windows event log. So as a process of elimination, I saw there was a bios update, tried to applied it, and the system bricked. Nothing that I did, it was all automated for idiots like me.

After phoning my brother and talking it through we eliminated the GPU as it’s not even doing anything when plugged into the motherboard’s HDMI connector.

It’s properly dead.

This is massively annoying. I have LOADS I need to get done, and for that I need a computer.

Thankfully, I have a pretty solid digital set up and as such, even though the computer died without warning, the critical stuff is already backed up. I want to be able to work anywhere so whilst I’m not 100% in the cloud, I use the cloud to do a lot of sync between devices. So things like The Accursed are fine because they get backed up as I write them. I have Scrivener installed as a default on all my devices in case of an instance like this. Likewise, all my tasks and notes are in digital apps and as such always available.

I also back up all my Warcraft add-ons and configurations to my gaming laptop – which seems like it will be my home for the next couple of weeks. I can pretty much jump back into any character and have everything set up just as it is on my desktop.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t weaknesses in my so-called disaster recovery plan. I want to do a ton of video. I even had video ready to be processed. Because of size, I don’t keep video in the cloud. I’ll need to wait for the machine to be fixed before I can progress a load of video projects.

Likewise, my Twitch. All the streamlabs configuration is on that PC, and whilst I could load up the software on my laptop, the idea is that it’s for gaming on the support bubble sofa. I don’t want to fill the hard drive with other software.

And the big one for me, and something I will change once the PC is repaired – The Climb thumbnails. Currently they are not in one of my cloud drives. Again I was worried about size and kept them off. It never used to be an issue because I would make the thumbnail on the day, but now I have them prepared for what feels like the next 2 years…

The Desktop is only 2 years old and under a partial warranty. However, I would not expect components to fail so quick and will make that argument to ensure that any replacement parts are at least heavily discounted. In the meantime, I’ll be probably working off my gaming laptop. I have an old macbook air if needed that has Scrivener and Photoshop but I don’t think I could run Warcraft off of it. So I’ll probably dump Photoshop on the gaming laptop and do everything from there.

In short, all the video projects are on hold which is SUPER-FRUSTRATING, but at least I’ve not lost any written work and can continue to work on various writing projects as if nothing had happened. I’m happy with that if nothing else. Let’s just hope the worldwide PC spares shortage doesn’t slow down the repair of the desktop.