The Phoenix is Dead

Seriously.  For real this time. There are no ashes left to rise from!


Okay, Background!


(Short version:  Phoenix was the name of my temperamental and highly abused computer.  It is irrecoverably dead now.  The story below is for my own amusement, so if this synopsis sounds unbelievably boring to you feel free to stop here and roll your eyes at my nerdyness.  Also, Gimlix!)

The Saga of Phoenix: A memorial

About 6 years ago, just after I got married, I bought a new computer.  Within the first year it had failed at least twice and needed several replacement parts and just caused general panic for a 3rd year English student with many many papers to write.  Hard drive, RAM, blah blah blah... Normal computer shenanigans.  My wonderful husband fixed it several times, and it eventually became a fairly stable machine which he took the liberty of naming Phoenix for obvious reasons.

A couple of years later, it started turning itself off randomly and we couldn't figure out why.  Everything we looked at was working just fine.  It didn't happen very often, and I no longer needed the computer for school work, so we decided it was just living up to its name and left it alone for the next year or so.  It would often hang in the boot up process, so I became reluctant to turn it off for fear that it would never come back on again.  Although I usually left it on for other reasons anyway.  Like not wanting to wait for it to boot in the morning, or waiting for a file to download.

Then the dining room lights started to flicker.  One professional friend's visit later, and we found out that we had a few minor electrical problems involving a couple of arcing sockets.  Including the one my computer was plugged into.  Note:  If something is having trouble getting enough power to work consistently, check the fracking electrical system it is hooked up to!  Ever since then I have had the funds set aside for a new desktop, and I have been putting it off until Phoenix was unusable.  Then my cheap hand me down laptop died so I got a new one of those instead, since I use it for work and you can get laptops with enough oomph to play most computer games.

For the last year or so, Phoenix has been hooked up to my Television as a TV/YouTube box and doing okay.  It's been SUPER sluggish to boot up and refused to open programs sometimes, but it was fine for what we needed it to do,  ie: download stuff and play DVDs.  Then we moved it. Apparently all that unplugging and moving and re plugging was too much for its delicate and tortured systems.  There is now a 1 in 3 chance of it booting (at at least 5 minutes a try to find out) , and a 1 in 4 chance that opening a program will not cause a system crash.  Yeah.  I'm not going to play at those odds. I'm calling it!

Time to pull the good parts into an unholy union with Gord's old computer, Gimli, and remake a new undead TV Box! What would we call that?  Phoemli? Gimlix?  Gimlix.  Totally that one.

Okay, that last bit may have ruined the memorial feeling a little bit.  But then, its just an old, always unstable computer.

Phoenix is dead, Long live Gimlix!