It didn't occur to me until I was talking to Eel about it last night.

The best case scenario for the computer is that the power supply busted. Given the problems that preceded it, I doubt that I will get away that lucky.

The day the cold front came through, three days or so before it died, the computer was locking up. It started with when I was playing video files or burning CDs (both actions are more prone to cause lockups than, say, Microsoft Word). The computer has always had a problem booting up because the boot drive has been on its last legs for a little while. The lockups during use were disturbing, but only insofar as I felt I would need to replace the HD before I was ready to do so.

So I resigned myself to the fate of just keeping it in file server mode and not logging in to it (using my laptop). Even sitting there idle was causing problems. Eventually it just stopped booting up. It couldn't get past the video card check or when Win2k was loading up, green horizontal lines would start to appear, then mishmash blocks, and it would reboot.

Then it rebooted, hung at the video card, green lines started appearing, and it died.

So my guess is that the motherboard has fried. The problem with a fried motherboard is that everything is attached to it, so any or all of the hardware on the computer could be effected. So next to a power supply issue, the next best possibility is that the motherboard died and after that is that the motherboard and RAM both will need to be replaced.

If the video card, sound card, NIC card, or whatever needs to be replaced, that's cool too. The boot drive itself is almost certainly dead.

What I'm worried about is the data drive. If it's gone, then I've probably lost most of my mp3s. That's heartbreaking considering how many of the CDs they came from are scratched.

But last night I realized it's possible that I lost my writing.

I usually have my writing backed up on both my network and my laptop via MS Briefcase. Last time I lost a data drive, I lost a year's worth of writing but had most of it on my then laptop. With Briefcase, the backups are always up to date.

Except that something odd happened to the laptop. For reasons I don't quite understand, it reverted to a previous saved state, meaning that certain applications that I've installed aren't there anymore.

That also might mean that the Briefcase is gone.

Which might mean that I've lost everything.

It's very unlikely at this point. It would require both a dead hard-drive and the laptop reverting itself to a version prior to my putting Briefcase on it (and Briefcase is one of the earliest things I do).

So I'm being paranoid.

I'm being paranoid, but until I get home and get some piece of mind, it's going to be a long, long day.

Update: All is well. Even the dying hard drive hasn't died yet!