Its been a little over a year since I bought my pc. All the components were hand picked. An intel MB (the most decent desktop board available here), 2.8 Ghz Prescott, good amount of SDRAM, 17″ monitor, 5.1 speakers etc etc. But, the most beloved member was my display card, the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 MB RAM.
This was one of the best cards available at that time, and a friend of mine who was returning from US got this about a month after I bought the PC. A month, every minute of which was spent fantasizing about Doom3 and other FPS games on the Radeon. I had downloaded the demo version of Doom3, and played it on the very night I got the card.
Then, increasing work load, an OS crash which wiped out all my saved games, and some other stuff did not give me time to play. I was looking forward to getting back to games (Doom3, HL2, maybe Quake 4) after Xmas. Was just counting days till 28th Dec… that is, till today morning.
Started out as another normal day. Got up, brushed, made some tea and started reading some news in google groups. Noticed a couple of spots on the monitor that had a funny color. Refreshing the screen did not remove them. Attributed that to a display driver bug, and continued reading. However, the spots did not vanish. If anything, they became numerous, and reading content off screen became harder. Rebooted the PC, and still no luck.
Some loose connection, I thought. Opened up the case, pulled the card out, and installed it again. Still no change. The display is full of strange characters and colors. Thats when the truth hit me, rather hard, in the solar plexus…. I have, inadverently, fried my Radeon…
(
Crying buckets.
