Problems in paradise (I)

This is the post no one wants to write when working with computers.

The PC dedicated to rendering that I bought in September is crashing.

Last night, I queued 93 renders to do overnight and, when I woke up this morning, it had done only four and the computer was restarted. Daz render queues do things like that from time to time, so I didn't think much of it. I restarted the queue and it started rendering. Without finishing the render the computer shut down. Not restarted. Shutdown.

I tried to turn it on and there was no way to start it. I followed the typical steps of disconnecting it from the power and then it entered the BIOS in safe mode. It did not show any error so I exited the BIOS and tried to boot it again. It does not pass the POST of the BIOS and restarts again. I have spent two hours doing several tests without success, so tomorrow I will open a warranty claim to the Spanish manufacturer or, failing that, to the online store where I bought it. They only work Monday to Friday.

How can this affect the update schedule? Right now I have no idea. It could be that tomorrow they will give me a solution (like updating the BIOS, for example) and everything will work as usual. I might have to send the computer back to them for repair or even get it replaced under warranty. But I don't know how long all this might take as this is the first time I'm working with that manufacturer.

An added problem is that the 328 renders that were already made for 0.18 are on that computer and, not being able to get to Windows, I can't retrieve them until the failure is resolved. So in case the computer is replaced I will have to re-render them.

What am I going to do while it is being resolved? Besides the time lost trying to solve the failure and the possible time spent in re-rendering those 328 renders, it shouldn't affect the development, since I still have my old computer to continue writing and posing renders. Unfortunately, you quickly get used to the good stuff, and the renders (and the story for v.0.18) are designed with the capabilities of the new computer in mind. The old one would not be able to render many of the images that are going to be there, especially the group images.

This post may be too alarmist right now, but I've always tried to be transparent with the successes and failures, with the problems and when there have not been any.

I'll keep you posted as soon as they tell me something tomorrow.