exploding video cards

The capacitors of my old video card blew up. There were four of them on the board and I think they gave up one at a time without me noticing. Months earlier, I would hear “plastic-ky” explosions in my room and I would search far and wide where it came from but would always end up empty-handed. There wasn’t any smoke and nothing smells burnt. Just the other day, I heard another one. I didn’t bother looking for its source and just carried on with what I was doing – playing World of Warcraft. Everything was okay until I decided to restart my computer. After it shut down, it didn’t boot. All the LEDs were still blinking normally and the fans seem to be working fine so I was able to deduce that the problem was with the video card. And it indeed was. There they were… 4 blown capacitors bleeding orange stuff.

Medic!

Poor thing… and poor me – I need to buy a new one because of this. It’s a good thing that WoW can run on the built-in video card of my mobo. I can hold off any purchases for now.

Oh no, you didn’t.

Oh yes, I did… I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again. I’ve decided to revive my account after almost 3 long years of dormancy. For now, I’ve just been using the free 10-day trial offered by Blizzard for the Cataclysm expansion pack. If I’m hooked after the trial period, I may be subscribing again.

I was supposed to buy myself an iPad 2 last Friday but after a recent unfortunate event, I decided to just give my hard-earned cash to Blizzard instead.

* * *

Yeah, I almost owned an iPad 2. I was at the mall during the device’s launch but I just stood outside – watching as the people eagerly handed out their credit cards to the cashier. I kept telling myself that the iPad looks good now only because of the hype surrounding it and that I will never actually use it. After 2 hours of that, I finally decided to just go home.

I know I will have no use for it but to be honest, I really want one. I’m trying my best not to give in to temptation and I’m wishing that by the time that I’ve REALLY decided to get one, there won’t be any stocks left.

It’s also not helping that my officemate bought one. I think he left it charging in my cube just to tease me.

Apple’s reality distortion field is really good.