I don’t think anyone is really reading this, so I’m posting this for my own amusement.

There’s been downtime lately, more than I’m comfortable with. Unfortunately, I’m dealing with more than one thing. The current suspects:

1. The machine is on when I go to bed, but off when I wake up. The BIOS was configured to leave itself turned off if it comes back from a power loss, so it stands to reason that there have been brief power outages in the middle of the night. I’ve changed the default behavior to always turn on, and connected this computer to an uninterruptible power supply. If I’m here and the power goes out, the power supply will notify me, and the system won’t go off-line.
2. I suspect the RAM may be bad. Originally this computer had 8 GB of RAM, but I had to remove half of it, as it had gone bad and was preventing the system from even POSTing. This stick may be flaky as well. I’m looking at possible upgrades, since I’d really like to have 16 or 32 GB in this machine anyway, for (heh) testing purposes.
3. Linux Mint is not honoring my power settings. I’ve changed everything I can think of so that it will never turn off the display, but it still turns off the display after about 10 minutes. A couple of times, when I have jogged the mouse to wake it back up, it’s rebooted instead. Sigh. This is a waste of my time . . .

Long story short, the downtime isn’t over, but it will be greatly improving from this point, and I’ll be taking more steps to improve it further, soon.