So this week my trusty desktop PC at home went down, hard.

On Monday evening it locked up: the screen would freeze, mouse and keyboard were unresponsive (even NUM LOCK could not be toggled), the screen saver would fail to kick in, the clock would stop. Cold boot time.

Tuesday, midday, it happened again. On Wednesday I couldn't get it to boot at all. The symptoms included no POST beep (that is, when you first power up a PC, there is what is known as the PowerOnSelfTest - POST - where it does a quick inventory of its overall health, followed normally by a single beep). The hard drive and optical drives would spin, but nothing else happened. No signal was being sent to the monitor. My USB hub, normally with a lit status LED right after boot, remained dark.

The PC was dead.

Being that I work in software engineering company, I asked one of the techies (a true MSCE) to look over my box. He stripped every component out - taking him about 15 minutes whereas I would have spent at least an hour to do the same - which eliminated those items as the cause. When I saw him removing the heat-sink from the CPU, I knew my PC wasn't likely to boot ever again.

His trip to the CPU was to ensure it was seated properly in the socket - sort of a hail-Mary pass - and once he determined it was, we checked the time and noted the TOD. That I bought the Dell 4400 new in February 2002, I really can't complain too much that it died.

He then did me a courtesy of pulling the hard drive and plugging it into a second PC he had to verify the data was still there; thankfully, it was. I have an external back-up at home, but it's so much easier to have the original at hand.

So now I need to decide: take some effort and invest some small amount of money (~$100, so I am told) and time (both of which are at a premium these days) to buy a replacement motherboard and attempt to install it. I have never done that sort of work before, and it may well be fun to do. But it would likely suck up an entire weekend, with no clear guarantee of success. And in this case, the definition of success means being little more than I was on Monday.

Or should I spend a bit more money (~$300-500) and get a new PC, and start fresh? I can easily install the old hard drive (either internally or in an external case I already own) and be up and running with my data and apps in a short period of time, with brandy-new PC.

I can go a little cheap on the new PC, because my last PC had two optical drives: DVD/burner and a CD. Since both are still fully-functional, I can get away with one DVD/burner (much faster than the 6 year old model) and install the old DVD/burner in a slot. And since my MuchBetterHalf gave me an LCD monitor for Christmas, I can even buy a PC without any monitor, too.

But even as fuel prices are slowly falling, I am still putting out about $27/day, and that is sucking up my surplus budget in a big way.

Lets see what deals I can find today and tomorrow... still, I miss having my MS Outlook calendar at hand.