Um …
The machine rebooted itself overnight, unwilling to face the rest of its short life in such a diminished capacity. This time the boot sectors failed to do their thing.
Which is mostly okay, as we'd already decided to take it out behind the woodshed and put it down send it to a farm upstate where it could live free and happy.
I've already ordered a restore USB stick from +Backblaze (huzzah), and pretty much everything else data-wise will be handled via Google and Dropbox. I do regret not having had a chance to get a list of applications that were installed, and a list of browser extensions (and bookmarks, as her Xmarks install had been a bit wonky). But that can all be recovered more or less as need be. I might end up buying a case for her existing hard drive and seeing if I can pull it up at least for reference on the new system.
It wasn't an entirely unexpected death. Back in July (https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2013/07/06/this-is-a-bad-sign-isnt-it.html) she was getting some disk errors, but we worked through them and —
Well, heck. That was a new drive back in July. Dagnabbit, Seagate. Or else the controller is going bad and is liable to spatter any drive that gets hooked to it.
Oh, well. Her computer is four-and-a-half years old (https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2009/08/09/best-buy-and-another-pc-purchase.html), and we'd been thinking in the replacement direction for a bit. We'll probably hit up MicroAge this weekend instead of Best Buy. If nothing else, hopefully this will also "fix" the strange Wifi problems she was having. Which will be worth the price of a new computer.
Meanwhile, time to shut down the old computer and yank the new power supply I added to it, as well as the video card we added and that pesky hard drive.
(Cartoon via http://xkcd.com/722/, tooltip "This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.")
