Well, my poor computer is still sick... Vincent will turn on now (it was the power button, like I was saying the whole time, but did tech support listen?  No.  They had to send a repair man to my house *twice*, which meant I had to take extra time off of work, and replaced the motherboard [twice], the power supply, and all the memory before they believed there might be a problem with the power button... and at least two of the sticks of memory they sent as replacements were bad.), but he's giving several error messages that aren't listed as having any meaning in the Tech Support Handbook, so it's been labeled an OS problem... the effect of this OS problem is that whenever I open a window that has a video file contained in it, the OS crashes.  As this was not the case before the Big Hardware Switching Extravaganza, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that one of the many parts that was installed is the problem, *not* my OS.  I would have thought that a problem like this would have shown itself at *some* point in the last two-plus years if somehow it was related to the OS being badly installed.  But it didn't.  Based on all the "Cannot Read Memory" errors, my hunch is that the rest of the new memory was bad, too.  Since I can't afford to take another day off of work, and I no longer trust Tech Support Central to send me working RAM, I'm going to order some myself and install it.  This whole mess has been ridiculous.  I wish that I'd been able to order my own power button to begin with... but while I can install RAM, I'd never be able to seat the panel that has the power button properly.  It's in the most ridiculous position.



In better news, I have a one terabyte external hard drive, named Brick, and I've been moving every file I have over there so that this sort of thing will never impact me again.  It may be a few weeks until I can get Vincent working, but hopefully I'll be able to get Shounen Onmyouji episode 12 finished 

over lunchbreaks.  I just need to find a secure way to bring Brick to work.



Your humble proprietor,

Skinner