Finishing new CD proved "too much" for PC

As of two days ago, I officially finished 100% the music for my next CD, which I have been working on, between other projects, since about November 2002. I'm now only waiting for the artist to finish the cover artwork, and then the CD can be sent off for duplication/manufacturing. It should be released in a few weeks.

No sooner had I announced the happy news on my newsletter mailing list, when suddenly my PC spontaneously rebooted. Being an Athlon user, I've seen it before. It hasn't happened to me in several months now, but I'm used to this kind of behaviour from an Athlon based system -- when the CPU overheats, it leads to spontaneous reboots. Time to brush off the fans and make sure the cooling is working as it should.

However, this time as the system was booting up again, I couldn't help noticing a strange, "burned" kind of smell. I was just about to shout downstairs to ask if anything was left on the stove in the kitchen, when the PC switched off completely and I realized the smell -- and indeed the smoke! -- was coming from my PC. I guess the overheating went a little further than usual this time!

The PC is obviously completely dead. It refuses to even think about starting up. I opened it up and removed all non-essentials (graphics card, sound cards, scsi card, hard disks, optical drives). Now when I hit the power button, the CPU fan does a few pathetic rounds and then shuts back down after less than a second. It's quite simply dead.

I think it's kind of romantic. The PC has been pushed very hard during these last few weeks as I have been working hard to finish the new album and pretty much been pushing the PC for all it's worth. It did the job, I finished the album 100%, the master CD was burned, and then it died. Maybe I should dedicate the album to the memory of my extremely hard working PC, which gave it's life to the creation of this CD. :-)

I have ordered a new CPU and Mainboard and will rebuild a new PC keeping my other bits (RAM, storage, cards, etc.). I'm now typing this on a laptop that I just happened to buy last week. Maybe I had a "sixth sense" of some sort, telling me that the end was coming for my PC.

The photo shows the corpse of my dear old PC, waiting for a new spine and a new brain (mainboard and CPU) that I can use to re-build it.

PS: The working title for the CD has always been "Beneath Another Sky", but I've now just learned that there is another album already called that, so I might go for a different title. I was thinking about maybe "Beneath a Different Sky", or "Beneath a Distant Sky". Other suggestions welcome. :-)

- Bjorn