Disastrous evening...

When events are overtaking you and everything is going wrong there can be a moment of complete clarity. In that moment you know exactly what went wrong and when it happened. I'm not talking about regrets, those are a failure to appreciate a life lesson, no I am simply talking about a realisation of the point where things could have gone differently.

Last night I had one of those moments, the clarity of vision showed me that I really should not have written that post yesterday. I should not have "spoken too soon", because last night it all went wrong.

The evening didn't start well when SUSE Linux informed me that Server#2 did not have enough memory for the YAST2 installer to run. I really hadn't realised what a bad spec that machine is, it's just run happily for so long that I've not had to think about it. However a 200MHz AMD K6 with 64Mb RAM probably isn't going to be much use.

After having failed to be able to install Linux on that machine I decided that I would do some programming to cheer myself up, of course this would involve booting up my main machine. This machine has been on its last legs for a while, since sometime in January it has begun to fail to boot, claiming that it has suddenly lost ACPI support. This was an issue with the motherboard, so a quick "Load BIOS defaults" and reboot would normally solve it. Last night it wouldn't even get past the POST check, no boot screen came on it's just dead.

I know it's strange but I am quite sad about this, I've had this machine for a while, it's seen me through a lot. I am lucky though, I'd recently copied all of my important data onto the other machines, even the stuff that I was working on last weekend.

For the time being I have made the move to Linux, with that machine being the only viable workstation I have. I now have to debate whether it is worth attempting to resurrect that old machine with spares, but I definitely need to start looking into a new PC, something I'd hoped to put off for a little while.