Yesterday a colleague brought over his PC saying that after a power outage his PC wouldn’t start and that it smelled like something got burned in there. Yesterday i didn’t have time to check it out because i had to finish a wordpress theme(i will post it up a bit later) so i checked it out this morning. At my PC desk everything was a mess, piles of books/papers/electronic components on each other so i decided to make some order after i check out my friend’s PC.

I opened up his PC and it did smell like burned components. I tried starting it up,but it just wouldn’t move(my first suspicion was that the supply got burned). I took my pc and hooked up the supply wires to his PC, and what do you know the PC got back to life . I called my friend and he was pretty excited to hear the good news(that his mainboard and CPU didn’t get screwed). I took out his power supply and told him to buy a 400W one tomorrow and i’ll hook it up.

Just by curiosity i opened up his supply and guess what? the fuse was intact. This is like Murphy’s rule:“everything gets burned down, but the fuse remains intact”.

I noticed that my PC is quite dusty(i don’t leave the side on, because many friends come over with their hard drives and i’m lazy to take it off every time), so i cleaned out my PC, and damn it was dusty. The coolers on the CPU and Video card were filled with dust. Last time i cleaned my PC in december i think.

Here are some pics:

My PC is like 4 years old. Its a good ol’ AMD Sempron 2600+(overclocked to 2000MHZ) with some tune up-s like extra 256 RAM(when i had 256 ram i was swearing because Photoshop was eating it all up, now i have 512 and i’m still swearing because photoshop is eating it all up,lol). and bought a Geforce fx 5500 256MB/128 Bit GPU along with an ASUS DVDRW. Heck it’s good enough for what i’m using it, the only game i have on my PC is counter-strike.

Get a new PC a Notebook?

I’m really considering to buy a HP or Toshiba notebook(with dualcore CPU and at least 2 Gigs of ram WITHOUT Windows Vista) and use it on field and as a home PC.

Here at home i could hook the laptop up to a monitor,  connect my USB mouse and Keyboard to it, remove the batteries(if you use your laptop for a long time it’s plugged into power supply then remove the batteries. You will significantly increase the life of your batteries if you use them only when you don’t have a power supply nearby.)

The investment would cost about 1.5K$, the laptop costing about 1.1k$ and a 20″ LCD monitor 400$. But i’m not prepared to use my money on this, because i’m saving the money for a trip to Greece(in July) and a trip to Hungary and Czech republic(in august), but hopefully i will be able to buy it as a gift for myself this Christmas.