Just convenience, really. Someone sent me a link to it showing it available from Screwfix. I was due to be in the vicinity of a local branch two days later so went for a click & collect there to get it reasonably quickly without making a special journey. I wasn't too bothered about price as long as it worked - which it did until the pc crashed.
Looks like it's terminal this time. When I powered it up this morning it was back to the single long beep and no POST. I did try holding down Del to see if it would go into the BIOS setup but no go.
It hasn't been flaky that long and until recently the only issue had been the screen randomly going blank and the Nvidia driver reporting it had stopped working and had recovered. That's been happening for a couple of years.
In recent months I'd started to find that some web pages were becoming less compatible with Windows 7. Some functionality was being lost, some just didn't work at all, and of particular concern was my online banking which stopped remembering my credentials so I had to re-enter them every time. My bank said it would no longer support such an old OS.
Although it's probably a coincidence the flakiness first appeared after I did a test installation of R3dfox as someone suggested this might resolve some of the problems. It didn't and I eventually uninstalled it but after doing that I was left with a problem with Windows Explorer not working properly and ended up having to restore Windows from an image created with Macrium Reflect. That got everything back working apart from a system file pdh.dll that appears to be corrupted. As this only seems to be for collecting performance data I've been ignoring it as the system has otherwise been working fine.
I had planned to try to upgrade to Windows 10. I recently did this on the PC I'm now using by means of Microsoft's Media Creation Tool and after smoothing out a few wrinkles this has been working ok but I'd quite like to get hold of an OEM disk with a genuine licence because I think what I did with this pc wasn't strictly legitimate.
Well, since starting to type this reply I've tried again to boot it up and now there is no power at all. No fans, no lights. I've opened up the power supply and checked that mains is getting to the circuit board and the internal fuse is intact. I'm more than ever convinced this pc is cursed. This would be the second power supply that's failed and before you say it I did check that it had an adequate power rating.
I gues the first step now is to get a new PSU and see if that gets it working. If not I'll have to rebuild it.
