Electronic Amnesia

So I woke up this morning and turned my PC on, walking away, only to hear that beep that traditionally means a big screaming system error. Since I have a paper due tomorrow and it's only saved on the PC cause I'm stupid, I hightailed it back to my desk, thoughtfully restraining my (not so) irrational screams of terror and frustration.
My computer sat me down gently, and said,
"CMOS battery error. Press F2 to continue."

Okay, what the hell is a CMOS battery, you damned machine?!
So I waited for it to boot and Googled it.
"Huh, that's funny, my clock says 12:24am. This better not be like the day the Playstation Network thing crashed and I lost some of my trophies," I thought as I looked for relevant information on CMOS batteries.
"Oh, I see, CMOS batteries apparently do important things like run my clock, and make sure it doesn't forget what programs it has installed, or what devices are connected."
Like...my...PRINTER that's been reinstalling itself every day since February?!
(Chris, I am disappointed that you didn't catch that!)
So after I mourned the loss of faith in my boyfriend as the end-all source of computer knowledge (and my personal Mr. Fix-it of all things electronic), I found that I just have to go buy a new one and install it. No biggie.
Except, well, that I'll be leaving town for the weekend soon. And I have a paper due. And my dog is on the downside of "happy and healthy." And Scott's birthday is next week. And, apparently, the longer the computer is off, the more stupid it gets.
Anyway, so I tried to sign on to Facebook to whine about it.

What, invalid security certificate?
"The certificate will not be valid until 4/13/2009 at 7:00 pm?"
So I double-check my clock.
"Wednesday, April 11, 2007."

Well...it still has the right month, anyway...and it hasn't fallen through a wormhole so far back into the past that electricity doesn't exist yet (I loved that about the Y2K scare and some other electronics that I've had do that)
But otherwise, it's hard to be more wrong.
So I logged on to Blogger to complain about it some more (had to accept another security certificate that's "out of date"), of course!
And then my email so that I can send my paper a million ways across the world before it becomes a random scramble of letters and numbers as my computer experiences its' own personal mental apocalypse and inevitably shuts down in unbelievable terror.












*EDIT*
The culprit?

This tiny thing.









My computer case is dusty.  As far as I could tell when I put it back together, it was working fine again.