Computer Disaster. There was a power outage yesterday, and when the electricity came back on, all the PCs in the house rebooted except for mine. After toggling the power button did nothing, I turned off the switch on the power supply itself. When I flipped it back on, the computer appeared to be powering up, but sounded different than usual, with all the fans seeming louder and faster than normal. About a second later, there was an actual explosion in the power supply with a small amount of debris, and large amount of smoke being expelled. The CD-RW drive's tray also shot open and stuck that way. Soon the room stank like burned circuitry, but I hoped the only damage was to the power supply itself.

The next day, I purchased a new power supply and tried it out. Much to my dismay (but really not to my surprise), the computer would do nothing by way of booting up. No fans spun. No speakers beeped. No hard drive made a sound. Well, it seemed the motherboard or the CPU was damaged, but I couldn't tell which it was without another system to swap parts out with (The other AMD system in the house was too old to accept my XP1700+ CPU). I could try out the drives in another system though. I had hoped that even if some of the data was scrambled that I would at least be able to recover some of it with a utility I had used in the past after an overzealous overclocking attempt. But these drives were so fried, they weren't recognized at boot-time. So, an 80GB and a 40GB drive down the tubes. The CD-RW with the blasted-open tray fared no better. It also wasn't recognized. What about my beloved GeForce4 Ti4200 graphics card? Dead as a doornail. In my grief, I still haven't tested my network or firewire cards. I also haven't bothered to test the floppy drive.

So, it seems I'm out several hundred dollars in hardware. Pretty depressing, but that's nothing compared to the DATA that I've lost. Everyone knows you should BACKUP YOUR DATA, and I've been pretty good about that in recent years, copying programming projects over to other computers on the LAN and burning really important stuff to CD now and then, but lately, with 120GB of storage, it's gotten hard to back up everything. My Christmas gift to myself this past year was going to be a DVD burner. That would have made backups much easier! My MP3 collection would fit on 2 DVDs as opposed to 14 CDs. I would probably have still lost things like the final season of the X-Files which was moved over from the HTPC to make room (1.7GB per episode!). There were other recorded TV shows and movies that were lost, but hopefully I can recover those via Kazaa. Anyway, I did not get this DVD burner Christmas gift for myself, so I did lose lots of stuff that was too big for CDs. MP3s I ripped from my own CDs are easy enough to re-rip, but a hassle nonetheless. I also lost lots of video-editing stuff, and the high-resolution versions of video projects. If I want a DVD-quality version of Extreme Alley 2001 or Boomerang Catch & Bionic Jumps, I'll have to recreate them from scratch. Of course the source video does still exist on the camcorder tapes, but editing individual scenes, music, transitions, and sound effects are no trivial matter. Probably the low resolution versions on the web today will have to be good enough.

One thing I thought I had lost was this last year's Christmas photos. When I first checked the CompactFlash card they were meant to be on, I didn't see them, but luckily they were just in a separate directory on the card. In January, I had burned all our digital photos to that point onto CD, so I didn't lose much in that area. Another bit of luck is that I hadn't worked on any programming-type projects lately, so I didn't lose anything in that area that hadn't been backed up a couple of months ago. At first I thought I had lost the source code to the programming projects Andrew and I worked on together (Simon and Concentration), but I was able to find the files backed up onto another PC on the LAN. Of course, any recently modified files were lost: Email boxes, saved game files, web bookmarks, etc.

On a good note, my mouse, keyboard, and most importantly, my monitor are all fine. USB peripherals like the scanner and a gamepad are also undamaged. Thank goodness my USB-connected digital camera is OK!

I still don't know what I'll do as far as replacing this PC goes. I've added up the cost of the parts, and it seems I might be able to purchase a system from a local shop about as cheap as I could rebuild it myself, but I'm not sure yet.