Wednesday morning 6:30 A.M. There's an eerie silence in The Home Office.

Over the next 10 minutes I come to the conclusion that the power supply on The Blogging Workstation, my four year old AMD Athlon 2500XP+ ATX Tower Machine that's the fastest PC in the house, has breathed its last.

This is the machine I use to sync my iPhone, and I'm only days away from buying a new MacBook Pro (or another high end Mac notebook, as soon as Steve Jobs tells us what the product line is for 2008). What do I do now?

Luckily I had a PC at the office that has been cannibalized for parts. I brought it home, took out the power supply, and initially thought that it wouldn't work with my motherboard. I found out that the 24-pin main connector for the motherboard was modular and could be divided into a 20-pin main connector and a separate 4-pin connector. I tried this and the machine started.

The Blogging Workstation still failed POST because I didn't connect the floppy drive and a few other minor things. I can fix those tomorrow. Hopefully then I can sync the iPhone and backup as much of my synced data, iTunes library, and other irreplaceable data on that PC to another machine on my network.

What a relief.