Apparently it’s hardware death week. So far, my speakers are acting up, my MS optical mouse is refusing random right clicks, and my 512MB DDR fails consistently under memtest86 on test 5, the last pattern.

I had to replace the DDR, and it seems okay, so far. The speakers seem to work on another machine, though, which makes me wonder if my line-out jack or the mainboard itself has been compromised on the machine in question. I’d actually rather the mainboard be bad, since PCI sound cards are a lot cheaper than a new set of decent speakers, if you know where to buy one. My replacement mouse ought to be here next week. It’s a blue colored one. Ought to be cute. It’ll be $16 AR, which is still way too much, but I need a mouse that works.

Sigh.

Fortunately nothing extremely expensive has failed lately, like my laptop hard disk that failed in the Spring, but thankfully was still under warranty. That would’ve been expensive to replace.

Messing around inside my computers always makes me nervious. Something always happens. I’ve already had to reseat my Geforce Ti4200 twice while replacing the RAM in its box today. Such things are strange, but seem to resolve themselves with some reseating of cards, or, in one instance, actually removing all the cards and reseating the memory. Strange.

Hopefully I can put off buying a new mainboard for another six months or a year.