I've successfully killed my 3rd PC in three years.  Congratulations to ME!  Apparently, the disk controller doesn't want to do any controlling any more and has since left the building, leaving me without a booting machine.  The monitor chose the exact same day to die, but Samsung have cheerfully said "don't worry - a new one will be with you in a few days" - even without a dealer-stamped warranty card.  Samsung, I love you.  May all my monitors be Samsung from hereon out.  I wish the same could be said for my PC dealer where my emotions are of a decidedly cooler nature...

Okay, it's not TRULY the PC dealer's fault.  I have one of those marvellous warranties where anything broken will be replaced - no quibble!  Yep, dear customer, whip out that faulty part and we'll send you a replacement - no fuss!  They do too; they sent me a new fan and a new hard drive when those items failed.  But motherboards?  The sad part of the warranty is that don't send out a tcchie person to accompany said part and fit it.  And my faulty part is the mere motherboard...  Great!  I'm the sort of person who can render a PC unusable simply by fitting a new hard drive.  You think I'm going to touch a motherboard???  I wish I'd paid the extra £135 (£135!!!) that forces an engineer to get off their proverbial bottom and do the replacing.  That will teach me.

Oh, and I live in one of those areas of the world where tractor technicians are ten-a-penny, but not a PC hardware technician to be seen.  There are quite a few small-ads where people advertise "PCs?  Oh, we fix anything!" in our neighbouring town 20 miles down the road (note: 20 miles seems to be just a bit too far outside any engineer's call-out area too), but a quick telephone call establishes that, when they said 'anything', what they actually meant was Windows being crabby about booting, a gummy mouse-wheel or ridding your PC of the latest virus.  Motherboards and disk controllers?  Nope, have I considered calling Korea?

I'm now using an old crate of a machine that was the first of my three failures with an overheating northbridge due to a failed northbridge fan (which no-one within 100 hundred miles wants to touch - and people in forums with a same-failing fan - oh, there are a lot of us - have all bemoaned the fact that no replacement fan will fit).  This crate doesn't have Sims 3 installed.  If it did, I expect it would go into nuclear meltdown (the aging graphics card reaches stellar temperatures before conveniently giving me a cheerful blue-screen reboot (well, 'reboot' isn't exactly true - it doesn't).

So all this is leading to: if my calendar of 'upcoming' becomes empty, I have not abandoned Sims 3.  Quite the reverse; it's killing me not to be able to carry on with two lots I've been building.  However, I am going to try to get Sims 3 working on this old tin box; I have a neat castle headed your way - nearly finished (it's the one pictured in my new stone wallpaper set).