Saturday afternoon, around 5 pm, I logged in to hit the AH for a few consumables. I had an SSC run at 9pm, and wanted to make sure I was stocked up on reagents, pots, oils and whatnot. Well, I turned to run out of the Ironforge AH, and poof. My PC shut down. Full stop.

I fired it back up again - maybe it was just bad luck, a random crash, who knows. As it’s loading I can see that the screen is covered with short 1 inch or so vertical dashes. The whole screen. Past the windows loading screen, I get nothing. No desktop, no safe mode, nothing.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Now, I’m not as tech minded as the guys in my IT department, but I know my way around the computer. I’ve been building systems for myself and friends and family for over 5 years now. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I was eventually able to isolate the problem to one thing: my video card was dead. I just upgraded my Mobo, CPU, memory and Video card about 6 months ago, and the card was plain dead already.

I flew to my brother’s place and picked up a VGA cable. (I long since made the switch to DVI, and couldn’t find a single VGA cable around the house!) Hooked up the onboard video, and it fired up like a dream. I had to turn every little option down to the minimums, but I was able to join the SSC run. My performance wasn’t noticeably worse, either. It didn’t LOOK as good, but WoW has never really been about the “looks” for me.

Thank the Gods for Onboard Video. And thank Blizzard for making a game that you don’t need a 8800GTX to run! I’m also glad that I bought the card from Newegg.com, as I can still RMA it!

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