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[smick]

That deep sea giraffe is all dangling a fraudulent counter check at the end of it's stock.  It's all (bubble bubble bubble) "Yooooou can keeeep the extraaaaaa for yourseeeeeeelf".

[linnea]

smells, yes...I would not have gone if Kelli couldn't go with me. Also, WTF about the creepy dude who tried to contact you about your car for sale! I'm glad you paid attention to your spidey sense and didn't give out your address. What a crazy asshole. Better safe than dead and chopped up in a dumpster somewhere.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Hey! What's wrong with snakes!

We've got MUTHAFUCKIN' SNAKES!

Yeah, that's better.

[Turbo Ninja]

Did you know electronics run on magic smoke?  They break when the smoke gets out.
A power supply fix is pretty easy (assuming it didn't somehow fry the rest of the board).  Get yourself a nice Antec.  There's lots of education available on such things at anandtech.com or Tom's Hardware (and a million overclocking sites).  Anyone who can figure out which end of a screwdriver is the pointy one can replace a PSU.

I'll investigate those links to see if I can't educate myself, but is it also easy to replace a hard drive?  GF has a cheap-ass Averatec notebook that worked like a hoss through her grad school days until...it...finally...just...wouldn't.......boot.

Diagnosis is a failed HD, and local Laptop Guy wanted $275 to replace it and recover the data.  I don't care about data recovery and $275 is like halfway to a new basic HP laptop, so I'm not paying that much cash to resurrect a four-year-old Averatec.  If I could do it myself for $150 or so, I'd be interested.  Is there any possibility this would be worth my time?

[jaydub]

Local Laptop Guy is probably charging a decent price for the service - if you like tinkering with computer innards though, and don't mind learning way more than you'll ever care to know about low-level stuff like setting master/slave dependencies, formatting, etc etc, then its not too hard.  Putting the drive in is easy - a step more difficult than putting in a sound card.  The annoying stuff comes with installing a new operating system.   Sometimes its very simple - sometimes you have to do a little head scratching and manual reading.  It really helps if you have a working computer around to look up stuff on Google.

[lprkn]

Hey! What's wrong with snakes!

No, I understand. An already obviously creepy guy who has snakes... it's probably not a good thing for the snakes either.

Fact: Snakes are drug dealer pets. If you have one, you are, or at least want to be, a drug dealer. Otherwise you are in denial.

[Turbo Ninja]

It really helps if you have a working computer around to look up stuff on Google.

Thanks.  Can'd for being nice enough to explain it clearly.

[AlohaDawg]

Here's one for you geeks out there:

Somewhere along the way I picked up some kind of virus/malware thingie that appears to create duplicate Svchost.exe files.

These seem to clone themselves, and then proceed to suck up all the virtual memory, eventually causing the computer to shut down or operate really slowly.

I don't know how to find/get rid of the cause or treat the symptoms.

Any ideas?

[CortJstr]

From what I know having multiple copies of svchost.exe running is normal, but having so many that it eats up all your memory is not.

I assume that virus and spyware scans have turned up nothing? You might want to try HouseCall anyway. Since it's online it sometimes finds things that the scanner on your PC misses. The reason being that many viruses target your virus scanner immediately, telling it to ignore the virus. The online scanner can't be fooled by this type of trickery, since it's not actually on your computer and thus can't be altered.