Hardware, fucking hardware
Remember those problems with my graphics card I was having back in February that resulted in replacing my GeForce FX 5600 with an old 256 DDR?

Well, the reason I'd replaced the 256 DDR in the first place finally came back to haunt me this morning. Bright patches of the screen (like, say, a window) would ghost across the rest of the screen slightly. A sign, I was told, that the card was on its way out and needed replacing.

It was light enough not to be noticeable, until this morning, when I turned on the monitor all I was greeted with was a total mess of overlapping graphics. The card had died.

First I had to check that the card had indeed died, and not the monitor, and thankfully plugging my laptop into the monitor gave a clear screen. I found the FX 5600 again and put that in, figuring I could live with some minor screen corruption until pay day next week.

Problem solved, you might think...

Except that after the stress of a few power cycles, the computer flatly refused to power up. Systematically unplugging devices and cards until it powered up happily led to my worse fear, the device preventing the power-up was the hard drive.

Keybuk's 7th law of hardware:

The expiry date of the warranty of any hardware device is always earlier than the expiry date of the hardware device.

In this case, the warranty of the drive expired on 15th April, one week ago.