Back from vacation. Found that my PC does not want to start anymore. What a nice way to start the new year!
I did not have much time to investigate what died. It could be the motherboard, the CPU, the RAM, the video card or the power supply. In any case, the PC locks up on startup and does not seem to initialize the PCI cards correctly. I am guessing that because I get no video signal and the lights on the network card get stuck in an unusual state, which usually means that the card did not get the proper signals on the PCI bus. Regardless of what it is, it looks like I will have to waste some time finding the bad components and replacing them.
Fortunately, my data should be safe. I learned a lot from the disk crash that I experienced a few years ago just when I was starting my (then irregular) backup on CDs. At that time, that caused me to lose a number of GIMP source files that I was working on, such as a preliminary version of a GIMP macro recorder. Since then, I have started doing automated backups on external USB drives in addition to the less frequent manual backups on CDs. USB enclosures are relatively cheap (about 10 EUR) and buying two hard disks instead of one (or 4 instead of 2) is also cheap in comparison with the value of the data that could be lost.
Even if my main PC will not be usable for the next few days, I can still use the laptop that I got from work. But for how long? I just learned that 2 of my 6 colleagues who had the same model of laptop experienced a hard disk crash in the last two weeks. Another one had a disk crash a few weeks before the Christmas break. And another two lost their data after coming back from vacation due to software problems. So this means that 5 out of 6 had problems with their laptop recently (OK, in two cases this was likely to be a human error, but still…). I am starting to wonder if there is a timebomb built into these laptops. So maybe I am next on the list. I’m going to back up my laptop now…