Scrap Metal

One day, I thought I heard a distant explosion—one you could think of as a failing transformer on an outdoor electrical post. My computer’s power flickered but It came back just nanoseconds later. But I was wrong. My computer wouldn’t turn on anymore. I realized what I heard was a discreet boom from the power supply.

My whitebox computer exploded Monday last week as I was about to print a document for our Electronics I report. It felt like the sky fell on top of my head. Panic struck me, though I came up with a way to retrieve the data. Besides, only the power supply really blew up. I just removed the hard disk drive from the system unit and plugged it into the external hard disk enclosure bought with our 250-gigabyte hard disk. But, I wasn’t able to print it right away as our notebook doesn’t have a parallel port. Oh well, at least the data wasn’t lost.

My uncle gave [or lent] me a spare power supply unit from an unused computer to replace that scrap metal I had been using since 2002. I’ve just finished replacing it yesterday along with a busted floppy disk drive and the much larger hard disk drive [the one bought with the enclosure]. I could really describe my computer as katay, which is Tagalog for butchered—a rather exaggerated term for something taken apart [then replaced] piece by piece.

If you could remember my past article, my desktop computer had its motherboard and CPU replaced. Now, I’ve just replaced the power supply, hard disk drive and floppy disk drive. Hmmm … I wonder when I could build my own computer from scratch with new parts.

Easy answer: Not today. *tee-hee*