Feeling Broke

I'm feeling quite a bit poorer than I have in a while.  Part of that is due to Christmas, and all the gifts that need to be purchased and shipped.  That part I'm used to.

However, we have incurred a couple of large expenses that are not ordinary.  These expenses are overlaid on top of the Christmas expenses.  Ugh.

This summer we had a walkway poured, and replaced our electric furnace with a propane furnace.  The walkway and a path to the propane tank need to be kept clear of snow this winter.  This will allow me to get to the shop and the propane guy to refill our tank.  I've had a little electric blower that we've muddled along with for years now.

It's not a great snow blower for a place where you get deep, wet snow - for a few reasons.

• It's electric.  You can only draw so much power from an electrical outlet.  This thing is rated at 14.5 amps current draw.  14.5 amps x 120 volts = 1740 watts of power.  That's 2.3 horsepower.
• It's not self-propelled, so you have to shove it into the snow.  That gets old, especially when the snow is deep and/or wet.
• It's a single stage, so it tends to plug up when the snow is deep and/or wet.  Sometimes it plugs up when the snow is dry and fluffy if you push it too hard into the snow.
• The auger, which is what rotates to pick up the snow and heave it out the chute, is made of reinforced tire rubber, and it's disintegrating.  Not robust
• All the parts are plastic, so they aren't very robust either.

Now, that said, it's not a terrible machine.  I mainly bought it to clear the deck, which is a small area.  I ended up using it for the concrete slabs outside the garage and shop, the deck, the path from the house to the shop, and the front door walkway.  It takes a lot of time to get these done with the little blower.  This thing would work fine in milder or drier places, like the powdery stuff the guy below is dealing with.

We had been wanting a legit snow blower for several years, and we finally decided to pull the trigger.

I'm pretty sure this will do the trick, quickly and efficiently.  They tell you the engine displacement, but won't say what the horsepower is.  I'd guess around 7 hp.  Should be plenty.  It's a two-stage, so it has another augur to blow snow out the chute after the big augur stuffs it in.  The high-wear parts are metal, so it should hold up.  You can do the plug-it-in start, so there is no need to huff and puff pull-starting a cold engine.  And of course, it's self-propelled, so it will bite into the snow without needing a shove.  The guy below seems to be doing well with it in some pretty deep stuff.  I certainly wouldn't want to deal with the snow in this video with the electric snow blower in the above video!!!

 

The other reason I'm feeling a bit broke right now is because our desktop PC crashed. I built it myself in 2010 with pretty high-end components, so the performance has held up reasonably well.  I'm not using it for VR or anything graphically intensive like that, so it's still holding up nicely.

However Windows has been crashing out to the blue screen of death every once in a while.  Having moved so many times lately, I'm unable to find the disc to reload it.  Finally it crashed for the last time while our daughter was playing World of Warcraft.  I'm not sure if her night elf character survived the fight that was going on when the crash happened :)

This had happened before, but this time it was not rebooting in Windows.  I got it to start in Safe Mode, but I have neither the time nor temperament to troubleshoot the source of the problem.  The checkdisk program spent about 10 minutes doing the garbage below.  Not a happy feeling.

This time of year I don't want to be without a PC.  We have online orders to place and track, so I needed a new machine fast.  Went to Costco.  Bought a laptop after thinking about it for all of 5 minutes.

This guy reviews it.  Just now discovered the video.  I guess it's a reasonably good machine...

Lastly it came with MS Office 365.  I'm not a fan of subscription services, where you pay an annual fee to keep using the software, so I purchased the business bundle outright at $250, which was the least expensive thing I've mentioned in this post...

So yeah, I'm feeling a little pinched at the moment!

UPDATE:
The computer repair guy called, and it looks like the issue was with the video graphics card.  It failed and so it could not display windows correctly, so the machine booted to safe mode where the simpler motherboard graphics could take over.  Pictures of the failed video card follow.

This was a hot-rod video card when I assembled the PC.  It's a GTX 560.

 

Fan shroud removed.  It obviously generates quite a bit of heat, judging by the aluminum and copper needed to carry it away.

Back side shows some discoloration on the board due to heat

The replacement is a GTX 1050 TI from MSI.  The graphical performance is roughly twice that of the previous card.  I don't really need to blast pixels out, but I also don't want it going obsolete quickly.  My sweet spot for price/performance is a ways behind the bleeding edge.

Edit:  Santa Claus (FedEx) delivered the goods.

Hopefully it will stay cool enough this time.

Installed.

Had some issues to work through after installation.  My video cable had some extra pins that the graphics card had blanked off, so I had to find another cable.  Then I had to install new graphics drivers.  However I eventually got it working and holy cow the images are amazing now!