There was pubbage, there was feeling a bit lurgified and livredor encouraging me to play console games instead of tidying up. There was a nice meal and chat with T, S and lownote. There was reading about BabySquee! (even if I do prefer kittens).

On Sunday my main PC decided to start throwing errors. I resorted to my backup OS/2 box and dashed to the Whitworth art gallery to see the William Blake exhibition. Foolishly I decided that driving would be easier - dash in, see exhibition with S, dash back home and ride my bike. Unfortunately the Mancunian Way was shut, and thus it took me 01:38 to get there.. Anyway, Blake was good, albeit perhaps not precisely my thing, and is on until April if you're interested.

Went back home, but the weather was crap and I was still feeling lurgified so decided not to go riding. Fecking cold :(. Instead I spent a number of hours shouting at my computer. It seemed initially to be a video card issue, but the error couldn't be pinned down. After checking all the memory, moving cards and so on around and updating the BIOS, the error went away apart from one PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA in ndis.sys. I'm not convinced I've fixed the system, but will see how it goes. It might be a cooling or power issue, but the (huge) heatsink is bolted to the processor, the PSU was an expensive one that actually delivers continuously at its given rating[1] and I've replaced a fan at the front of the system.

[1] When buying a power supply for a PC, it is worth understanding that the cheap ones don't actually do what they say they do. A cheap 500W supply may only be capable of delivering 500W in bursts, or the amperage on some of the connections may drop when this is reached. A decent 500W supply will deliver 500W 24/7 with no drop in current. If you *must* buy cheap power supplies, buy one rated considerably in excess of what you actually require, but I'd recommend buying a more expensive lower capacity model.

Likewise, when Nvidia/ATI say their graphics solutions require '600W minimum' this is usually based on using crap PSUs. Read the specs - if the maximum power draw of all components is less than the PSU's rating plus some margin, you're good to go.