For the last year or so, I’ve had trouble playing World of Warcraft on my desktop computer. The game would load, but after a while – sometimes seconds, sometimes an hour or two – the whole system would crash, either freezing up, rebooting itself, or just shutting down completely.

After some troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the video card and the power supply, but I didn’t know which was actually causing the problem (and I didn’t have a good way to test either). I knew that the video card was at least the immediate source of the issue, since the crashes were also happening when I was manipulating lots of images in Photoshop and doing other graphically-intense things, but I didn’t know what the underlying cause was – in other words, was the video card failing, or was it just crashing because the power supply wasn’t providing enough power?

This all came to a head last week, when the hard drive in my laptop failed. I’d been using said laptop to play WOW, so losing it essentially meant losing WOW. And indeed, for a week I played WOW occasionally at best, never counting on my desktop to be up for long.

This week, I replaced my power supply (thanks to my parents, who want me to be able to do artistic stuff in Photoshop). On Monday, I installed the new supply. Today it’s Friday, and things have been running without a hitch since then. I’ve had WOW up for hours and hours without trouble, I can open dozens of images in Photoshop, and everything is running smoothly.

So hopefully you’ll start seeing more posts here from me again!

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