Thursday I work until 6 PM, a total of 7 hours, and I expect to be footsore by the end of my shift. Then I get to do it all again on Friday. Whee!
But the money will help matters so very, very much....
So what happened on Wednesday, after all the travails with my computer? Why, of course, Mrs. Fungus' monitor died!
She tried turning it on, and it would display an image for perhaps fifteen seconds before going dark again. I tried fiddling with it--including dis- and re-assembling it--but all that managed to do was get it going for thirty seconds rather than fifteen.
My inspection, however, revealed that three 470 uF capacitors on the power supply board are bulged at the tops. You know what that means: the manufacturer used cheapass caps and they died, and the power supply is therefore kaput. I went down to the basement and had a gander at my old toolbox from my tech school days, but sadly there weren't any 470 uF capacitors in it.
...why do I keep this junk? I never have what I need, so why have it take up space? *sigh*
Anyway, Mrs. Fungus really wanted to get "the Hallowed" in WoW, and with the end of Hallow's End in WoW bearing down on us we had gotten her highest-level toon to 89th level last night in preparation for doing the final achievement which one needs in order to get the title. But that was about 5 AM, so we went to bed, not suspecting that her monitor was about to die. Argh etc.
So I looked up some monitors on-line, and it turned out they had some pretty good ones on sale at work, so we put ourselves together and hied ourselves hence. It developed that I do not actually get my employee discount until I've worked there for thirty days (argh etc) but a new monitor was still within my means--barely--and we bought one that was a step above the cheapest one available. (My discount would have saved me about $10 on that price, and it only costs a little more to go first class....)
Got home, plugged it in--it looks splendid. Mrs. Fungus is happy with it, and I bet she'd be even happier with it if we were to get a DVI cable to connect it with, rather than the VGA cable her system uses now. (Yes, there's an adaptor between video card and the cable.) But that's a task for next week, or whenever we have time for it. The important thing is, the new monitor works, and we were able to get her the title she craved.
As for her old monitor, I believe that all it needs is a few new capacitors in its power supply and it'll be good to go. I just need to find a reasonable source for electronic components; I dislike the idea of driving to Fry's for sixty cents' worth of caps. (Tolls are egregious and the Jeep gets 20 MPG; you do the math.)
Of course I will not be able to buy them for that. If I can get them for less than a dollar apiece it will be a small miracle, and it's likely that I'll end up paying for shipping on top of that.
The thing that's most gravelling about all this is that one used to be able to go to Radio Shack and buy electronic components, and there used to be about four of them within easy driving distance of the bunker. It's not that way any longer, sadly; there may be one or two but now all they sell is consumer electronics.
So I'll look for an online source, get three caps, and put them into the monitor; and if that fixes it, we'll have a spare flatscreen laying around, and I can't convince myself that's a bad thing.