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Alright, here’s a little more detail:

It all started a couple of weeks ago when my friend Mark asked me to help him with his computer. Mark was in the middle of building his first computer and the process had come to a standstill. He had all the parts, he had them all together, and nothing would turn on. I brought my computer over (beause we had similar setups) and swapped parts back and forth with him until we learned he had a bad power supply. A quick trip to Best Buy solved that problem, and Mark was on his merry way. I, however, had a new problem: I had the computer bug again.

You see, I used to spend a lot of time building and rebuilding my computer. It was a source of pride. Some guys had their cars, I had my computer. Dorky, yes, I know. Deal. :) Anyways, I’d been building and rebuilding my own computers for a long time. And then, around a year and a half ago when it came time to replace my system which had been damaged beyond repair in a storm, I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to build my own system. So instead, I did the next best thing: I went to an online computer store and custom built my computer. They sent it to me pre-assembled and pre-tested. All I had to do was plug it in. And, for the last year and a few months, that had been enough for me. But that changed two weeks ago. I touched the Forbidden Fruit. I held my CPU in my hands and thought of all the things I used to do, and could be doing.

A few days after that, I ordered a new computer case and power supply online. I decided, in light of my economic situation, that I would upgrade in increments, buying a piece at a time. My case and power supply arrived Friday, and I spent the entire night (since Megan was visiting her family) putting the computer together. After several hours of labor, carefully moving everything into the new case and arranging it just so for the greatest visual appeal, I turned it on.

It ran beautifully. I was excited. It stayed cool, it looked awesome (see the picture at the bottom), and it was glitch-free. I decided it was the perfect opportunity to do some software updates I’d been putting off for a long time. First on the list: the BIOS.

For you computationally disinclinated readers, BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. It’s a little tiny piece of code that sits on your motherboard (not on your hard drive, where everything else is stored) and tells your computer what to do after you push the power button. Manufacturers often release new versions of the BIOS, which can improve system stability, performance, and so on.

I went to my manufacturers website, which wasn’t very intuitively designed, and after a bit of searching found the list of BIOSes, which weren’t documented at all. I downloaded the one I thought I wanted, restarted my computer, replaced my BIOS with the one I’d downloaded, and resetarted again.

Nothing happened.

Now, in my defence, I’ve spent the last several years working primarily with Dell computers. I’ve replaced dozens of Dell BIOSes. If you try to put an incompatible BIOS on a Dell computer, it won’t let you. That’s what we in the biz call ’smart’. I guess my computer wasn’t smart. It didn’t warn me at all that I was overwriting my perfectly usable BIOS with one that wouldn’t work at all. It wrote the file, restarted, and that was that. The computer still turns on, the fans still whirr, and I can hear the hard drive spinning up. That’s it.

And so, dear readers, that is how I created this very pretty, very glowy paperweight: