R.I.P Desktop

Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. My home computer has officially died. Last night the heat sink / fan started making a funny noise. This morning I decided I would buy a new fan. But before I could, when I came back to the computer it had turned itself off and the fan had completely died. I hoped that the CPU hadn't fried itself when the fan went off, but had no way of knowing. I tried replacing the fan with another one I had from the computer graveyard, but that fan also didn't work. I even went out and bought another heat sink / fan. No luck. I tried replacing the CPU with an older one and still nothing. It won't show anything at all on the screen anymore when you turn on the computer. I think I may have damaged the motherboard at some point when I was trying to replace the heat sink / fan (those things are a complete pain to put on and take off).

Not sure what the next step is. I tried taking it completely apart and seeing if maybe I had introduced a short in it at some point, but even after I tried that it's just dead. And it's not like I can buy any replacement parts either, since everything is over three years old most places don't even carry tech this old anymore. Technically I could probably buy another processor off the internet, but that seems unwise since I really don't even know if a new processor will fix the problem. For all I know maybe the processor is fine and I just broke the motherboard when I was trying to replace the heat sink (or I could have damaged the processor replacing the heat sink now that I think about it). Not to mention if I bought another one of those processors I would be paying a premium for it since it's so old.

So it looks like I may be in the market for a new desktop. The question now is do I try and roll my own like I have in the past, or buy one already put together (Dude, you're getting a Dell, whatever happened to that marketing campaign?). Really don't want Vista, so anything I bought I wouldn't want to pay for Vista (or any operating system really since I already have XP Pro). My other alternative is that Ginger really wants a Mac, and her computer is identical to what mine was (the only exception being the processor). So I suppose we could get her a Mac and then I could take her's (although her's is as old as mine was, so that would probably only be a short term solution (plus her's had that problem where it was shorting out and always rebooting). Man this really isn't something I wanted to deal with right now. This also means I've temporarily lost access to a bunch of my pictures and stuff. And any processing I do now would be with the laptop, which really blows for post processing since the LCD doesn't do that good a job of displaying colors and stuff correctly.