Who shall live and who shall die

Now that Yom Kippur is over, I have to wonder whether my computer is not long for this world, because it seems to be FUBARed.

On Sunday, as soon as I booted up the monitor went directly into sleep mode and couldn't be awakened. After I hard-rebooted several times, I got BSODs for "unmounted boot volume." The solution to that seems to be to go to the Windows repair console, but I was crashing before I could do that. Some kind folks at a computer forum helped me get the PC to boot from the Windows CD -- I didn't realize I had to change the BIOS setting to make the computer boot ONLY from the CD drive -- and I eventually eliminated the BSOD (after about 3 hours).

Now we're back at booting up directly into sleep mode.

If you have technical advice, please email me. If you have wiseguy advice, like tossing my computer out the window, you can leave it in the comments.

UPDATE (10/3): This problem occurs with both monitors I've tried it on. But last night, with the backup monitor, I was able to boot into VGA mode and get the video card settings changed to something normal. It now boots fairly normally with my 17" backup monitor, but doesn't do squat with my regular 19" monitor, and you can really get used to a 19"-er. I'm going to substitute in an old videocard I have in another computer to see if that solves the problem. But I'd still appreciate any tech advice you have. (pillageidiot -at- hotmail -dot- com)

UPDATE (10/3): No luck with the old videocard, but check out this image ("Attila of the monitor") made by Kevin Dayhoff, a fellow member of the Maryland Blogger Alliance. It's wonderful.