Oh... [bleeeeeeeeep]!

Well, I knew bad luck had a mate. Now I know his name. It's PITA (pain in the ****!).

My PC is definately stuffed. Coloured confetti on the screen from the very moment I turned in on the other day.

So I did the usual things they tell you to do, when you place a call to tech support (no need to do that here, I did Tech Support for a few years a while back).

Then I checked the connections, looked inside the machine, to ensure all the cards and cables were still properly seated, the whole shebang.

And I've come to the conclusion that the blasted graphics card has, for some reason died. Old age, I suppose. It was made back in '01 after all. Well, it's had a fair run, I guess, but a few weeks of warning would have been nice. That way I could have had a spare sitting to hand.

Now, I have to wait to payday (Friday), to go get a new card. No problem, you might think.

Actually, a large one.

I do a LOT on my PC at home.

Add to this, it's an old PC. A fair few of the comoponents - the graphics card, motherboard, and so on, date back a fair number of years, and they don't make a lot of the stuff for those card slots any more - the failed graphics card, for instance, uses a standard called AGP (Advanced Grapics Port) that was a standard for about five years, until PCI-E (don't ask me what that stands for, I haven't a clue) came out.

And then all of a sudden, without me spotting it (OK, I wasn't looking), parts of my PC became obselete practically overnight as manufacturers moved to the new standard.

So now it seems I have to go looking for second hand parts, to keep my current machine running, until I can afford to replace it completely.

Life's a right PITA at times, innit :-(