I've been noticing a lot of problems with [story: wraithsandnecromancy Wraith] lately. First, it was a bad stick of RAM, then it started turning off by itself at random. The best I could figure out was that it was a bad power supply. All the signs were there. Luckily, I had a spare power supply lying around, or so I though.

I installed the spare power supply and when I went to connect the 4-pin connector to the motherboard, it wouldn't go in. I pulled it out and looked into the connector on the motherboard, and it looked like something was stuck in there. So I looked at the connector on the old power supply. I was suprised by what I found. I've never seen anything like that before.

The best I can figure out is that it shorted out at some point in time, but it looks like it had been that way for awhile. But after thinking about it some more, the only way I could imagine it shorting where it would do that is when it was installed. I hadn't installed the power supply in that case or motherboard. I blame Duck.

So here I was, left with a dilemma. I have my old P4 2.4 GHz processor and motherboard I could install, but it has problems too. It wouldn't support the 3.2 GHz P4 from Wraith either. So I went out and spent $300 I shouldn't have. But it was either that, or work from my laptop for a long time. That's just not acceptable.

So now, I have Spectre. On the bright side, Spectre has a dual core AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. It's a nice speed bump.

The downside of all of it was that I had to do a fresh install of Windows Vista. I'm posting from it now, but I've still got a lot of software to reinstall today.