Alright so the computer crashing at the end of last month turned out to be a false alarm (¿mixed metaphor? it wasn't an "alarm," so just, like, well it wasn't really a crash anyway) and when we zooted the computer by the shop it came on just fine, booted up as if it had never lost power to begin with. I didn't have to pay for anything: the guy took a look at my power supply unit, and was like, well what the heck that's very smoll, and called someone else in like hey check it out and she was like, well what the heck that's very smoll. So.
My power supply is an L500EPM-00, which is giving my computer 500 watts of electricity to, work with or eat or however 'lectricity works- that's a proprietary power source and I can't find an exact equivalent for my build on the Dell website's Batteries and Adapters Parts and Upgrades page, but the power supply for the XPS 8930 (when I've got an 8940) offers up 850 watts and I can find a few Alienware models on there that need 1000 watt power supplies; doing a little poking, XPS 8940 can ship with a 1000-watt power source or a 750-watt one (all of those numbers being higher than 500!) and like the the the L500EPM-00 is not something the XPS 8940 even ships with! (There is a bronze-rated 450 volt XPS 8940 option though?)
So what's going on? I'm not positive on this but here's what must have happened, I Think: back in December of last year, when the poor computer's poor heart gave out and everything fried, I took it to this other place, Nevada Computer Works, before I took it to Comp-U-Build. They must have been the ones to get me the new power supply unit (PSU!). They had a proprietary Dell PSU lying around, which is not something they had at Comp-U-Build (CUB!), and could plop that in, even if it was a little weaker than the last one; any was better than none. Probably. I say I Think it's how that happened because the computer was taken to CUB a few days after that because the power-doesn't-seem-to-be-working-at-home-but-it's-actually-fine-and-just-on-my-end-try-plugging-it-in-somewhere-else-maybe? thing happened at that point too, guess we figured out why that keeps happening, but they didn't mention anything about the comically underpowered PSU then, when it seems pretty instrumental. But the L500 would have been in by that point anyway, either from being built like that in the first place for some reason, or from Nevada Computer Works. So.
Either way it's left me paranoid about working on my computer, all month. 500 watts with my high-end graphics card... well let's just say it's a good thing that I haven't had a chance to do any gaming yet, aside from a few 8- and 16-bit games from Steam and elsewhere. (Apparently editing video doesn't actually require much video card? counterintuitive, but, thank goodness for that nonetheless.)
When the computer seemed kaput at the end of last month I promised myself that if my files survived, I would do immediate backup and create redundancies and everything, so we could finally bring my project to land. "Immediately" took until today, I guess! Because of the paranoia, yeas, and because of the complexity of what making backups of my data actually entailed: thousands of files representing hundreds of gigabytes of data, spread out over three external hard drives, one external SD card and the internal RAM drive. I'm not even entirely finished yet! I just started this post to give me something to do while some files were migrating. And now I'm finished with the post. And I still have work to do.
...
oh! and I said that I'd use this month to do some like, editing on NaNoWriMo projects? Yeaaah so I've barely done any of that. Because of the paranoia. And now that I don't have to be paranoid anymore, after finishing off this last bit of file backup? I can work on my Very Ongoing Project instead. It was a self-defeating idea really.
AND ALRIGHT just finished backup of the final thing, updating the redundancy folder I created seven months ago (to the day, it turns out.) Now to create multiple redundancies... and this part is less obvious, because ideally that would mean on a separate drive from the one I created the first backup on, but it's the only one I have with enough space for everything (more than a quarter of a terabyte!)