After a year of blogging, I finally started feeling comfortable enough with it to begin posting almost every week and it’s been nice because I don’t feel like everything I’m sharing is a day late. Plus, if something comes up last minute, I can work it in more easily rather than having to wait a month.
Then in the middle of working on Mother Mercy deadlines, my PC started randomly shutting down. It wasn’t overheating, rather, it wasn’t saying it was overheating, but it was pretty dusty and if I ran the AC or a fan right next to it, the shutdowns weren’t as frequent.
Since I work on computers regularly, I decided to get into the case and see what was going on. Here’s the thing about that. Computers can be pretty different. And while I’d done some work on my tower before, I’d never deep cleaned it. So I decided in the middle of a book deadline I decided to tear down my PC and give it a good once over. But as with any renovation, you’re bound to find more when you open up the walls than you’d banked on.
Well my PC was no different and next thing I knew, I was on the hunt for 90% alcohol, thermal paste, and electronics tape. There was no way I was going to get it cleaned and reassembled before vacation or even before my draft was due.
So I did what any reasonable IT professional would do. I phoned a friend. A more experienced professional, an adult-ier adult, if you will. I’d seen some of his custom builds before and was mostly looking for some advice. I had almost made my peace with the mess I made and was looking at new desktops. I figure old faithful would be my standby for practice builds and future upgrades (the graphics card is trash and the power supply is pitiful).
So we talked through the work I would need to do and the new PCs I was looking at, then he said the magic words. “I actually have a custom PC I built for fun, but I need to sell it and it would be better than the ones you’re looking at right now.”
Now you know me and I’d always rather shop local and small businesses. So when I saw the compact design with RGB fans thrown in, I was sold. “But Chandra,” you say, “when do we get to the part about the vlog?”
So that’s the amazing part. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had stopped vlogging and making videos for YouTube because my old laptop and desktop weren’t up to the task anymore. They didn’t have the processing power and it took so long to do anything I couldn’t game or make videos.
But this new computer? So much faster. Multi-tasking? No problem. Rendering a video takes a fraction of the time, uploading, exporting, all of it makes a day long task take less than an hour and I couldn’t be happier. All that said. Vlogs are back. My first one went up at the beginning of October and I’ve got another one coming in November. I’ve also been able to make some new timers, including themed ones for Mother Mercy. I’m not sure about the rest of the content I use to make. A lot of how I spend my time has been on the research side and now that my writing process is established I may share more of what works for me. If there is interest in that, I can make some videos about it in the future, but for now, I’m planning vlogs and timers. And you can find me here on the blog, typing away.
Chandra Arthur 
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