Not Your Average Roadkill

We saw this a couple miles from my parents house on the way back to the airport. It’s not every day you see a small, dead alligator.

I spent the weekend visiting family. I spent Thursday night at my parents house, went to Tyler to see my grandmother there, returned to my parents house Sunday night, and flew back to Colorado Springs this afternoon.

Anyways, the weekend was busy, and since I was staying up late fixing my parents computers (replaced the power supply in one, updated windows, installed a wireless card, and some other small things on the other) I’m about ready to go to sleep.

Progress?

Actual progress:
I finally reported the leak from behind my refrigerator to the apartment office. Duston (the maintenance guy) came and promptly pulled the refrigerator away from the wall (which caused the spigot where the ice machine connects to the wall to start spraying water), commented that it was loose, and tightened it. Problem solved hopefully, and if it happens again I’ll try that fix. I figured the valve wasn’t seated properly and expected it to be a somewhat more involved fix, but if this works that’s excellent. Now I should probably get around to mopping up the water/dissolved kitty litter marks in the utility room.

It also appears that Dustin was the one who installed the carbon monoxide detector with Talore in the room. As soon as the door opened and she saw him Talore hissed and started edging towards something she could hide behind, so I shut her in the bedroom.

The reason for the ‘?’ in the title:
I hoped I had resolved the pink screen of death (PSoD?) when I switched power cables to my video card a week or two ago, but it got worse last night. Now when I log into windows it does it, and last night it did it multiple times before it loaded my desktop. Further reading suggests that it’s a possible hardware problem (like I burnt out something with the hairy fan). I was hoping to wait for the next generation of video cards before upgrading, but it looks like I may be prompted to upgrade sooner. Alternately I could switch to my old video card (nvidia 7950 down from a gtx 280), but that’s probably not anywhere near to up to the level of performance I’m used to.

Pink Screen of Death

Dusting my video card didn’t do anything to keep it from freezing apparently. It didn’t slow it down, and now it’s happening twice a day if my computer is on long enough. Usually the first is on login before I even load anything graphics intensive.

Windows once let me search for fixes to a problem, but it didn’t find anything and didn’t actually tell me anything about the problem so it wasn’t exactly helpful.

A quick search on google found a youtube video of (apparently) my exact problem. Looks like next time it happens I’ll be poking around in my power supply wires. I can’t remember if I have more of the type wire that goes to my video card than I used, but if that’s it hopefully switching cables will fix it.

It also sounds like the series my video card is in sometimes have an issue that sounds like this, and since I was strongly considering upgrading my video card sometime soon this might be more incentive for getting around to that.