It's been almost 7 months since the SSD drive died. Finally was able to afford to get it fixed.

Haven't really bothered with PC gaming since then except for bundles. Anything I've been missing out on?

7 months! I lost mine for 8 days and fell into an incurable pit of despair that led me right off the wagon. My congrats to you Sir.

Welcome back!

Lucky, my laptop is on the verge of dying soon, and my brother is all stingy with his Desktop because of his interest in DOTA 2 and playing single player games while streaming it.

I really cannot wait to get the money for my own desktop.

ouch painful! my condolences!
but yay its back, bet you did a happy dance when it was all fixed!
the ssd dyeing is not helping my decision :p

yep to ssd or not ssd. wow never heard of a hd going without warning! i have a thread many people have been kind enough to put input with.
im still unsure really. want one to play with but thats a lot of trust i have to place in it and i dont have the financial back up to help me if it goes wrong now. if that makes sense?

From what I gather and from my experience with the SSD, the only reason you'd ever want an SSD, explicitly, is if you want to make things load faster. It doesn't make them run faster, it doesn't lower the system requirements and the one I have now is a 128 GB SSD and it was significantly more expensive than the average 500 GB HDD. And I Google'd to be sure I just didn't choose a pricey one but the average results I'm getting are 128 GB SSD for about $100 and 500 GB HDD for $60-$70.

They're good for games that generally have long loading times or faster loading of commonly used files and applications but that's about it, as far as I can tell.

7 Months would be way too long for me, I'd go crazy and start blowing stuff up. Or I'd just buy another PC.

My current gaming PC just became sort of "half-dead" 24 hours ago and I already feel my sanity slipping. The bloody thing had been having trouble for a while now, booting it after prolonged periods of inactivity would result in getting stuck at RAM detection. I had to let it warm up for a while and shut it down and boot it up again, and then It'd get to POST. Most of the time. Changing the RAM didn't help one bit.

Sometimes it'd get stuck on USB INIT too, though that was rare. Had a few HDD write/read failures too, and lots of GPU problems. Now my GPU's (an old Geforce 9800GTX) gone bonkers, started shoveling loads of BSODS at my face, and showing pretty colored dots and lines all over my screen. Even the DOS-style POST screen is all messed up.

Still, I managed to boot in safe mode, and didn't get and BSODS there. Uninstalled drivers, and installed more recent ones. Doesn't crash anymore, but device manager says "the device won't start" and I can't play any games. Still getting weird visual artifacts on the boot screens too, and they're getting worse. Strangely though, I don't get any artifacts once I'm in Windows.

I'll try changing the motherboard tomorrow. I actually have a spare one gathering dust. I just don't have any thermal paste, which I'll need to re-apply for the CPU. Hopefully it's the source of all my problems. And if it isn't, well I'll be annoyed. This PC is over 5 years old, and I was going to get a new one soon. But I'm not quite ready for that yet, and might not be for a few months.

I suppose the culprit could also be the PSU, considering the range of issues I've been having. But the MB seems more likely. The GPU's probably busted too, and it'll be a pain to find a replacement that's both cheap enough and gives me comparable performance.

At least I'm not worried about my hard drives. And even if I manage to make them explode, I still have backups.

Well, to be honest, the worst part about it is that in the year I'd had it before it went dead and I wasn't able to afford to fix it, including what died when it died this last time, I've lost three 4 GB sticks of RAM, the SSD, my cooling system and replaced the PSU because that was believed to be the culprit originally.

All in a year. Not sure what's wrong with the computer, as it runs well before parts of the computer die and they die suddenly, but there's certainly something that must not be wired correctly.

Oh, and consoles helped the 7 months without a gaming computer. :D

Wow, 7 months. I've been considering purchasing a spare laptop just for that reason. It has to be in the below my $350 price point and have all the options I want, which will never happen unless the Xmas sales are good to me.

Ditto. Less than a year old on a replacement platter drive, and it crapped out. Didn't just lose data and all that, but it was even preventing the PC from finishing the POST. First time I'd encountered that type of HDD fault. Worked perfectly fine one day, toast the next. Recent back-up ftw.