When I woke up today, all I wanted was to play some music from my PC, and go make myself a coffee. Yeah, right. Malo sutra prijatelju. I press the power button on the bloody box, and it turns on for two seconds and then dies. Unplug the box, wait a few seconds to reset the power supply, try again, same result. Shit. There I am, thinking, which part of this hellspawn machine made a short circuit mess... Open the case, check the motherboard, unplug the drives, remove PCI cards, still dies immediately. Take the MB out, still the same. Hmmm. Must be the power supply. Take it out, open the fucker, clean tons of dust, check out various capacitors and such, nothing suspicious. "Fake" the power-on signal by shorting two leads on the ATX connector - power supply revs up normally. Fan spinning. Voltmeter in hands, I inspect individual leads on the connectors, all the voltages are there. OK. As Johnny often says, "I'm confused". Everything still in pieces, I connect the ATX connector to the MB, punch the power button, and it spins up, CPU fan and all. Fine, I say, it's just one of those "switch off/switch on and it works" phenomena, just a bit spiced up. So, I assemble everything, plug in all the peripherals and give it a go, and it just goes zzzzz-click. Back to square one. AAAARGGH! This time, I just take the ATX power supply lead, fake the power-on and measure the voltages again. The -12 wasn't there for a sec, but then it came back. Hell, I think, maybe I didn't make good contact with the probes. Put the connector back in it's place, everything works. Good.Puzzled, but happy, I think "maybe it's a good idea to remove that modem that I'm not using, and rearrange the PCI cards since my LAN card is too close to the graphics card's fan..." So I do that. Boot up, and behold! Linux does not see the sound and LAN cards. Neither do Windows. Linux can see the secondary graphics card, but it doesn't use it - no picture on my secondary monitor. Hmmm.... After spending some time trying to configure my sound card, I just plug the modem back in, and everything works fine. Reviving the secondary display took another 40 or so minutes...
And all I wanted was some Massive Attack and a coffee. Was that too much to ask?
Later on, I found out that my mobile phone decided to switch itself off, right when I was expecting a call. Fortunately I saw it was off not long after the last time I used it.
I guess this is just one of those days...
