And then my network card asplode...

I'm not doing too well with windows machines at home lately.

So last month my 4-year-old AMD that I was using as my primary machine stopped booting up. Luckily I had a spare machine - a CISNET celeron 3.06 that I got for $200 from one of CompUSA's "midnight madness" sales last year. It's been working out OK, even though it lacks a few of the things my old machine had, like dual monitor support and more than 6 USB ports (my old machine had 18, not counting hubs).

So I was printing out something for my class tomorrow (only 7 more sessions!) and my machine rebooted itself. Comes back up and won't hit the internet, tells me that it can't find the DHCP server. Reboot my router, same thing, reboot the machine several times, same thing. Get on the macbook, it gets online fine. OK, so maybe wireless is working on the router but wired isn't. Disable AirPort, plug into network, works fine. Try to disable and renable the onboard NIC on the CISNET, something that sometimes works on some of the machines at work. After about 5 failed attempts to get into the BIOS on the cisnet (you have to hit delete, and then either F8 or delete again, or something...), I give up. Pull the old Netgear PCI card out of my old machine, plug it in... and it works fine.

So I guess the onboard nic died. Not to mention when I tried to print anything, it restarts. I haven't tried to troubleshoot that... I'm kind of frustrated. Too bad that I think this thing is out of warranty, and even if it's not I'd have to send it to Secaucus and be without a PC for a while.

I think I really need to get cracking on building a new machine soon.