The Best-Laid Plans Still Go Awry

Today's run/walk: nada. Unplanned rest day.

Mostly because it's 10:33am and I'm still in my robe. Why? Well, I'd decided to swap out my PC towers this morning, after doing my backups and file-saves and all kinds of due-diligence last night. But this:

New Dell tower

... has a bad video card. At least, that's what I thought when I unhooked everything from the old tower, hooked this one up, and turned it on. After an initial Windows is starting screen, everything got all crazy-pants on the monitor. All kinds of pixelation and shimmy-shaking going on. I think I set up a user account, but couldn't well see enough to be sure.

So, I called Dell. "Yeah, hi... I'm trying to hook up my new tower, and my old monitor - which works fine with the other computers in the house - is all messed up. I think the video card is bad."

Nah, couldn't be that. We did a bunch of trouble-shooting, re-initializing, rechecking connections (again - I'd already done that twice), resetting to factory defaults, etc. Boot it up again - same thing. So after an hour on the phone, the conclusion: my video card is bad. And of course, it's integrated with the motherboard. At least I don't have to send it back, as they'll send out a technician. Unfortunately I won't have time to have technical guests at the house for at least a week and a half.

Ah, well... the old tower is back in place for now. I need to go take a shower and get moving.