Drivel HQ went on the blink the other day while I was listening to tunes on Pandora and hammering away at some lumber in the far corner of the basement. Putting down the hammer, I trotted over to the computer and jogged the mouse around on the table top. Nothing. Batted at the keyboard a little bit. Still nothing. Bet you’re impressed with my diagnostic technique.

The computer was frozen solid. It’s done that very occasionally, and I’ve always been able to fix it before by powering it down and right back up again, but this time when I powered up it froze again while booting. Power cycled again, same thing. Third time’s the charm, I told myself as I cycled power one more time, but the Incredible Cosmic FU that watches over everything decided it was time to let me know that, no, third time is just third time. There is no charm. In fact, this time the computer didn’t even post to BIOS, which means, to those of you who don’t know or care what the computer is doing inside the black box wired to the screen, that my computer was dead. The fans whirred but the screen remained black. No beeps, no flashing lights. Dead.

The thinking part of my brain knew that this was irrevocably bad, but the part of my brain that still believes in Santa Claus thought, Could be just a glitch. So I powered it down and powered it right back up again.

Black screen. No beeps, no lights.

Or not.

My desktop computer was a gift from T-Dawg who cobbled it together for me from some parts he had left over after rebuilding his own computer several times over. I bought the case, power supply and hard drive, then he came over one night after work and an hour later I had a bitchen desktop better than anything I’d ever owned before. Besides tooting his horn for him, I guess my point is that I have only the vaguest of ideas how it works, and practically no idea how to fix it, so I did what most parents do when their computers break down: I e-mailed an SOS to T PDQ. Help me, Mister Wizarrrrrrrd! And what do you know: He showed up at our door the next evening with a big box o’ computer parts.

After showing him what was wrong and suggesting a few of my own theories, he said something like, “What you’ve got there is probably a dead motherboard,” and asked me if I would mind if he replaced it. I assured him I would not mind at all, so he set to work. The motherboard he whipped out of his box o’ parts looked like something from the steampunk world. The CPU was a block of plastic and metal as big as a half-pint carton of milk, and it was cooled by an elaborate system of copper tubes and fins that snaked every which way across the motherboard.

“Holy crap! Is that the RAM?” I blurted out, pointing at two thick cards with curling metal handles. The last time I bought RAM cards, they were thin black chips. These were thick as a slice of birthday cake and fitted out with cooling fins. Tim chuckled. I’m so quaint sometimes.

About an hour after he began gutting the box, I had a computer again. Quaint I may be, but really, this is amazing. It’s got twice the power the previous incarnation had, and he even managed to upgrade the video card so I can get full resolution on the computer screen. Never figured out how to do that before; had to with this one when the computer didn’t recognize the card and booted up in low-graphics mode.

So I’m up and running again with cutting-edge technology that lets me bat out drivel like this, read other people’s drivel and watch videos. Yay.