Dreamweaver was giving me problems yesterday so I rebooted. Or, rather, I turned my computer off and it came back up partway. The graphic image of your motherboard logo or graphics card that you see for a second before your system starts loading? It stopped there. That's kinda weird.

Memory was fine, checked it in different slots and tried different memory sticks.
Blew out all the dust everywhere.
Video card was fine.
Unplugged all the drives, same thing.
Had it down to either the power supply, the motherboard, or the chip. None of which I could easily test without buying the components.

Here's the difficult bit: Office Depot has a clearance price on an HP Pavillion computer that's better than what I have now: $399 after rebate. Tempting.

So. If the problem is my power supply, 30 bucks and I'm back in business. Still need more memory and my CD/DVD drive is busted, and my video card isn't robust enough to keep me in SecondLife without locking up. But my computer would be back up and running.

But if it was my motherboard or chip, odds are that I'd have to replace both and possibly update the memory (mine's DDR), and by that point I might as well buy the new computer. But I don't really have a spare $400.

But there isn't a computer shop nearby that's open this weekend. Nearest one is 45 minutes away. But they have a diagnostic service. But I'd have to leave it there for several days. But the computer at Office Depot goes off sale tomorrow. But it has Vista and I don't know if all my software would work with it. But it has a 500 gig hard drive and 3 gig of RAM, and assorted media goodies. But I don't want to spend the weekend setting up all my software and settings. But I don't want to spend the weekend driving around buying components and swapping bits out of my computer to see what works, But I don't have a spare $400.

I was about three annoyed steps away from buying the damn thing anyway, when my brother-in-law tried unplugging everything. It came up! We started plugging in things and finally found this: my Palm Pilot was in the cradle when I rebooted, and apparently my computer thought it was a drive and tried connecting to it, and stopped. No warning, no error messages, nothing. Weird. My Palm was plugged in and it brought my computer to a mysterious standstill.

So, problem solved. All it took was 24 hours of anguish and near-financial drainage to return to where I was yesterday. Go me!