Conspiracy

Today is almost exactly one year since my previous PC shuffled off this mortal coil, the victim of our well-intentioned attempts to upgrade the hard drive and install XP Pro.

After I got home from work, I switched the PC on and surfed back to order some extra yarn. I'd just added it to the basket when my monitor screen suddenly faded quite gracefully into many multicoloured vertical lines. After a split second of thinking, arg, a virus, I realised it was probably a hardware fault. The monitor wouldn't switch off and we had to pull the power from the back. Poor PC had to be hard-powered off.

Tried reconnecting the power and switching on again - nothing. Power checked out OK in the other monitor. My monitor - dead as a dodo. It was an LCD/TFT-thingummy 17" screen we'd had for 2 years or so. Obviously we worked it into an early grave!

Ended up down the road at Comet (we have a handy-dandy branch about 5 mins drive away) and got an Acer 17" screen. Looks very stylish with a narrow silver surround, and matches the PC. You just don't expect your monitor to do bizarre things like paint itself in a ton of pretty colours then croak. We could do without the extra expense but in this house, PCs are near the top of the electronic pecking order :-) They say jump, we say how high :-D It's definitely a conspiracy.