I love my PCs. I've dabbled in some consoles over the years but PC has always been my preference. Over those years, I've either been very lucky or my careful choices and care of my PCs has in fact served me well.

My previous PC lasted 7 years... well, really only the motherboard and CPU, but still. It was a generic, but powerful, store bought model and by choosing the right model at the start and careful upgrades over the years, the core of it survived all that time and remained moderately powerful through most of it.

My current PC was a custom ordered build. Now maybe this is where the luck comes in rather than just my good choices, but compared to my friends glitchy and problematic PCs, my own has been entirely problem free and running perfectly for the first 3 years of its life.

Until now...

A crash and corruption

My PC almost never crashes. When BF3 first came out and was glitchy and desperately in need of patches, my friend had all kinds of bluescreens. I don't remember having any... BF3 would crash, certainly, but at least more gracefully.

For this nearly 3 years I've been pretty damn happy with how well my PC has been working. So it was pretty sudden an unexpected to have quite such a severe crash.

Playing Guild Wars 2, everything was working as expected. Then on a level transition the screen glitches out, square artifacts all over, locks up and then the monitor turns off thanks to 'no input'. All the signs of a pretty bad graphics crash. Rebooting, I discover that the corruption remains... and that takes things up a step of seriousness. Event viewer shows that it was a bluescreen (that I couldn't see of course) and that the graphics drivers have been corrupted. So I reinstall, reboot and everything goes back to normal...

PC Diagnosis might as well be ESP

So, I mentioned I love PCs and have used them for years, but that doesn't mean that I'm some tech wizard. Going into BIOS is still worrying to me, and half the options in there I have no idea what they're for. I might be better than average at preventing and fixing problems, but of course in the end it all comes down to google right?

Of course, even with the power of the internet, diagnosing specific problems is a tricky business. How do you describe 'graphical corruption' specifically enough to find a similar case? When event viewer only tells you there was a crash and the drivers corrupted, how do you get more information?

One thing I immediately suspect from the lack of information in event viewer is that a hardware issue seems likely. It's shortly given more weight by the same kind of crash happening in Kerbal Space Program. But once again, nothing is clear cut about it. Sometimes the drivers corrupt, sometimes they don't. Then I turn on my second monitor so that I can have other processes open to monitor things and the crashes mysteriously stop. Or do they. Intermittent problems are the most annoying thing to diagnose...

Now turning on a second monitor somehow fixing the problem is ridiculous of course. So in the mean time I've run disc checks on my harddrives, memtest on my RAM and even a vmemtest on my graphics card RAM. Of course, all of them come up clean. It's been a week since the last crash but I've got no real ideas what's happening.

Then finally, the crashes come back with a vengeance. Now even the Steam main page causes a crash. So that's it. I'm left with no other ideas than it must be a hardware problem with my graphics card.

What better time for an upgrade?

My graphics card is not underpowered by any means. It has been a while since I last had any new, amazing game to stress it, but I certainly wasn't at the point of thinking it needed upgrading. But apparently now I don't have a choice.

I quickly drive to a friends house to pick up a temporary replacement, which is somewhat older but still good. I'd like to also have it be a way to confirm that the problem is a hardware fault in my graphics card, but of course with the problem being so seemingly intermittent and the fact that I've removed the thing that was theoretically causing the crash, there's no chance of real proof.

I quickly make my choices and order a new graphics card...

So we're all good right?

Ordering a new part to replace something you think is broken and then still having problems is a nightmare scenario. I plug in the new card and my BIOS freaks out. As I said earlier, I'm not super familiar with BIOS, so I'm already totally worried. Fortunately, it seems to sort itself out without me having to change anything... maybe. I don't know what it was actually doing.

After booting and getting drivers reinstalled and such, things are looking good again. I run Borderlands 2, since I think it might be the most system stressing thing I have installed aside from Guild Wars 2, and it crashes... whee.

But this was a regular, dump to windows, error box kind of crash. After verifying the Steam cache it runs fine, panic over. Then I try to run Guild Wars 2. The launcher pops up, trying to download an update and my wireless disconnects. Now that's a confusing outcome. I try EVE Online and the same thing happens; moments after launching, the wireless disconnects.

My first thought this time is a power problem. But my power supply is huge and the new card only requires the same plugs, so it seems unlikely. I get on to google and the next suggestion is IRQ conflict.

It's getting all Sound Blastery up in here

Now IRQ conflict is probably a problem from before my time, or at least one that was significantly reduced by the point I would have been really getting into PCs. I don't know much about it, so this already seems crazy. Several message board threads of people with similar problems seem to disagree whether IRQ conflict is even possible in Windows 7. And if it is, it sure isn't easy to fix since the option to even assign IRQ manually is disabled. I do notice that although Windows isn't detecting a conflict, my network card and graphics card are in fact on the same IRQ.

So, before I go and even try assigning IRQs, there's fortunately a quicker way to test it. If I physically swap my sound card and network card over in their PCI slots, then the sound card will be on the slot with the same IRQ as the graphics card instead.

Having opened my case again, swapped things over and reinstalled drivers, I can finally test it... and the exact same wireless disconnect happens. So it's not IRQ conflict... another fun waste of time.

Wireless signals... ESP... it's all in the air, man

So I'm out of ideas again. This problem seems bizarre. But then I notice a post I had idly dismissed the first time reading through a forum thread, suggesting that maybe its some interference from the monitor cable messing up the wireless signal.

Now, on my previous graphics card, the antenna for my wireless was actually squeezed directly between the two monitor cables joined to it. So surely that can't be it...

But naturally...

Turn the antenna 90 degrees away from the cable, everything starts working. Damn it.

The end?

So everything is fixed now. Or at least I hope it is. Of course there's no real way to tell. Just have to wait and see... or hope not to see that graphics crash again...