RIP 'The Beast' 1999-2003

It's official. The Beast is dead.

I have determined what happened. A faulty file on my computer caused the CPU to bomb, aborting the entire computer. Unfortunately the video card was attached to my television at the time - an electricity spike made it back into the video card, instantly frying it, the mainboard, and the CPU. I am unsure of the integrity of my hard drives or the operational capacity of my optical drives but suffice it to say that for at least the next 6 months I am computerless.

I am still in shock a little bit but have managed a temporary solution by slaving my work laptop to my home monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers which were untouched. I won't be able to check my drives until I get a new mainboard/cpu which will be months down the line because I have to pay off my debt to mom.

The Beast was purchased as a college computer in late 1999 by my parents for ~$3500. On the day I knew it was arriving from UPS, I played hookey and gleefully assembled the components and installed Quake 2. At the time, Alex and Graham had much better computers than me but even Alex's could not handle the hardware lighting at resolutions above 640x480. I started playing the game at 1024x768 on it's built in ATI 8mb AGP card and visions of my friends' jealousy filled my head and danced around next to the hours of Quake2 and Decent I would be playing.

Since it's arrival in my life, I have poured approximately $6000 into it, encompassing 5 video cards, 3 new mainboards and CPUs, 2 sound cards, 2 mice, a keyboard, a Network card, 4 hard drives, 2 optical drives, about 9 sticks of RAM and somewhere on the order of 50 video games. The only thing left of the original was the case, the dvd-rom, and the IDE ribbons.

Rest in peace, Beast. You have served me well.