I am not really surprised to find out that many of the problems my main PC has been suffering over the past few weeks was brought about by over-heating. Apparently the fan that was supposed to be helping cool down the main processor was so clogged with dirt that it could no longer spin, and the secondary fan just couldn’t cope with the excess heat created by the unit as a whole. Needless to say, I was glad I took the unit to be cleaned today, aching muscles aside.
Still it was a day of extra expenditures; aside from the seven hundred and fifty peso cost of the cleaning itself, I was pretty much forced to get my unit a new power supply box to replace the overworked one it had been running on for the past six-odd months. The new PS is a branded 600-watt unit, a far cry from the generic 500-watt clunker it’s been drawing juice from, and costs more than twice the price of a generic unit, though it makes up for the difference in performance, comfortably powering all the current systems and internal hard drives I have without as much as a hiccup (so far), compared to the jury-rig I had been forced to use before (where one drive and a DVD player had to remain cut off to reduce strain).
I’ll have to see in the following days, but so far this little visit to the shop has resulted in a much healthier system, though I’m very sure that I’m going to be feeling the blow to my credit accounts (which I’ve constantly mentioned to be painful, as I am currently a full-time student again) in the months to come. Ouch.
Speaking of the shop visit, I was able to do some reading while I waited, specifically on Roland Barthe’s Image, Music, Text. No, I haven’t been able to get too far into the book yet, but the ideas he presents are very interesting, particularly on the subject of the denotative and connotative messages inherent in images such as photographs or paintings. While still verging on the academic in language and composition, it’s an easier read than Heidegger, whose circular language gave me headaches.
Posted by Myssa 
