The last few days, the quote "Well behaved women rarely make history" has been rattling around my head, and I want to do a... a thing connecting it with appropriate female sci-fi characters. (I've put the beginning of it on my userinfo - more interesting and apposite than that pizza meme.)

Question: Should I keep it confined to female villains? Winn, Servalan, Grayza, Seska, Six, YoSaffBridge, people like that? Or should it also include stroppy kick-ass heroines like Kira Nerys, Janeway, Zoe, Xev, Starbuck, Jenna, Ro Laren and Aeryn Sun? Or perhaps there should be two separate ones, heroes and villains?

...and how does one make animated .gifs, anyway?

Wayyyyy-hey! I unplugged Charlotte, opened her up and had a good look round, and discovered that there was one circuit-board-thingy held in by plastic clips that had escaped from its clip and come loose. It's butted right up against the IDE cable that was one of the things that got fiddled with when topbit opened her up to fix the power supply, so it looks like it got jogged loose during that job.

Anyway, I pushed it carefully back into place, clipped its clip shut, put the case back on, plugged in, booted up and checked My Computer > Properties with bated breath...


...and she's back to 384MB RAM, just as she should have been. So it's not been blown and I don't have to spend money I don't have to make her functional again, and with a bit of luck these infuriating constant crashes will stop now. YAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!

Many thanks to santaman for prodding me into doing that.

I still feel like crap and probably won't be online much for the next few days, but at least I can do stuff again now. Phew.

I never realised quite how desperately crappy my cheap old mouse was until I plugged in this new one. Thank you topbit - the man with the excellent peripherals...

New power supply in place, and Ethernet connection up and running as well. We're saving switching over to Linux for another day.

Thank you topbit - I probably could have sorted it without you but it would have been far more painful, worrying, slow and expensive.

:-)