How Do I Nerd vol. III: Care and Feeding of Twitchy Computers

[ship_go_boom]

So, it appears the volume controls on my laptop have fried.  Poor Ballantine thinks that someone is continually tapping the "Volume Down" button, complete with annoying electronic clicky noise... I can turn the volume back up through the desktop interface, but it clicks right back down again.  In related news, the mute button still works.  :P (And no, nothing is touching the button.  That's the first thing I checked.)  This, coupled with the garbled alien Morse code it was blipping at me on... Monday? Maybe Friday, but I'm going with Monday... leads me to believe that this poor beast is dying.  Slowly and painfully dying.

At the same time, my desktop has forgotten how to drive.  This is not the first time it's thrown a "Port-00: Hard Disk" error my way... in fact, this is the third go-around with Case of the Invisible Boot Device, but rounds 1 and 2 I was able to (temporarily, it appears) fix the problem in relatively short order.  A couple hard restarts would remind it that it has a whole terabyte AND an operating system, I check for problems, it says a chipset driver is missing, I install it, we're good to go.  The first time it happened (shortly after I got it, but long enough afterwards that I can't blame the guy I got it from), I figured the driver had always been missing or improperly installed, and it just took a while to throw a real problem my way... and because the driver auto-installed into a Dell subfolder, rather than into the Intel folder, I assumed that round two (~3 weeks later) was basically the same story - that the first fix didn't actually fix it, and it was just luck that it took so long for the problem to resurface.  Reinstalled the driver, this time in the Intel folder, the message center blip goes away, and I have three months of happy gaming on a computer that, despite the frustration, was still a total steal... and now it's doing the same thing again, but reinstalling the driver AGAIN didn't help, and I can't even harass it into booting up.

A visual check of the hardware didn't turn up any loose connections, obvious shorts, or even discombobulation-causing dust bunnies.  My wishful-thinking hypothesis at this point (which may be totally erroneous and not have anything to do with how computers actually work... I'm a competent user who can handle relatively advanced maintenance tasks, but solving serious problems is beyond me, especially with newer machines) is that something went wrong when the hard drive was partitioned, and now vital information that should be in one place is now in two places.  Like I said, I don't know if that's even possible.  Really, I'm just hoping that the problem is software-based... wiping down and reinstalling ALL the THINGS is a pain in the ass, but it's both doable and free.

Long and short of it, I'm probably going to have to shell out for at LEAST one, maybe two computers in the very very near future.  I was kind of already thinking along those lines before things started breaking, but it's sort of traumatic to need to start shopping for expensive things (I was just getting used to having real money in the bank, too).  The original plan was to upgrade my laptop (which is 5 years old and has had a cracked lid for quite some time), but keep it simple... good-sized hard drive, decent graphics and sound cards, but otherwise frill-free, because it's really only going to be used for internet, Netflix, and music.  There had also been mutterings of El building a proper gaming machine for himself, handing off his current desktop - an eMachines with highly upgraded graphics card - to me (I have much lower standards, so long as it runs the game without crashing, I'm happy), and relegating the mini-tower I'm currently fighting with to the closet as a media server.

The real question, now, is how much of that do we do all at once?  I figure my options are: 1) get a no-frills laptop for around $600 and hope we can revive my desktop; 2) get a slightly nicer, gameable laptop for around $750+, cope with the temptation of having games on the "office" comp and the crowded hard drive, and either accept that my tower is a large paperweight or rehab it as a media server; or 3) drastically move up the schedule on our long-term plan by getting the $600 laptop AND El's new game system... dunno the price on that, as he wants a scratch-build, but I'm guesstimating at least a grand?  $1,500-ish?

If we lived in a magical world where food and utilities were our only expenses, I'd say hell yeah to option 3 (working 11+ hour days through most of October and November had its benefits), but with property taxes coming up and student loans being an ongoing thing, that's probably not doable.  Especially not with soil sample season pretty much ending yesterday, meaning I may only have one more scanty paycheck between now and April.  :/ We're going to have to do some math about the next couple months' expenses before we decide on anything...

Any thoughts, suggestions, or dirty limericks from the aether?

Oh, well... I suppose I should accomplish some stuff.  I had planned to pay the water bill and go to the bank, but... well, there's a small blizzard.  I don't care if these errands are within walking distance, I'm not going out there!  Maybe I'll do some more laundry...