Friday, May 15, 2009
I Am Going to Computer Maintenance Hell
So it started a couple of days ago with my computer suddenly shutting off suddenly and sporadically. Not a nice shut-down --- a shut off. Power suddenly going away.
A little bit of experimentation over the course of a day or two revealed that it was the cooling system. Or specificially, the fan on my really cool liquid-cooling system I bought three years ago to protect my then-awesome (and expensive) CPU.
Nowadays, the cooling system costs three times as much as the CPU to replace. Hmmm....
I'd configured the bios to automatically shut off the system if the CPU ever became too hot. Strangely enough, the cooling system worked okay without the fan as long as the system was just sitting idle or doing nothing more taxing than browsing web pages. But if I started playing a game or doing too much 3D editing or whatnot, it would shut off on me.
I have to either fix or replace the fan, but that might take a little bit of time. I have a bunch of old CPU fans from a graveyard of older PCs sitting in storage, so I began salvaging. Unfortunately, none of them fit. So I fit the fan in with one screw, and locked it into place with ... ummm.... a heavy-duty paperclip. I'm not sure if that is a step above or below spit and bailing wire.
However, it seemed to work great, and I was able to do some gaming without any CPU overheating. It's not a permanent solution, but it keep me going for a few days.
Speaking of hardware issues - you may have noticed that the website has been going up and down. We're working on a solution for that, and should be migrating the server to new hardware soon. So expect a little more down-time over the weekend, and then Rampant Games and Tales of the Rampant Coyote should be in a new home.
UPDATE: If you can see this, we should be migrated to the new server now. Seems the hard drive on the old system died, so we expedited a move to a new host. There are still some issues being resolved - game links not quite working right yet. But we're getting there. Slowly. Hey, Laxius Force is working, I think....
Labels: Geek Life
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:00 AM (Permalink)
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Funny the same thing happend to me last week. Pulled the whole thing out put in a heatsink and fan works great.
# posted by 
: May 15, 2009 10:44 AM
: May 15, 2009 10:44 AM
I may be doing that if I can't fix or replace the fan cheaply. I don't really overclock my machine or anything, so this is really more cooling than I need. I got it because I had run into heat problems on previous machines, and figured I might as well splurge and make sure that was NEVER A PROBLEM AGAIN.
And it hasn't been. Until now.
And it hasn't been. Until now.
I had a similar problem with the system shutting down and resetting, especially when doing gaming. However, the cause was a bit different...
The problems only started when I got a new memory DIMM. So I eventually narrowed it down to the one DIMM, which if it was in would cause the system troubles.
I never knew what was wrong with it, exactly, but a tech friend of mine suggested it was probably a hairline fracture that would start to pull apart, causing multiple memory errors, when it was heated enough to expand. A new DIMM I bought had no trouble, so that seems as plausible as anything.
Mythbusters should devote a show to computer hardware myths...
The problems only started when I got a new memory DIMM. So I eventually narrowed it down to the one DIMM, which if it was in would cause the system troubles.
I never knew what was wrong with it, exactly, but a tech friend of mine suggested it was probably a hairline fracture that would start to pull apart, causing multiple memory errors, when it was heated enough to expand. A new DIMM I bought had no trouble, so that seems as plausible as anything.
Mythbusters should devote a show to computer hardware myths...
I had that problem too, many years ago. I was getting weird crashes, not a shutdown, but it drove me crazy until I pulled the DIMM and everything worked wonderfully...
Oh man this just reminded me of my computer maintenence hells..hell even the upgrading part were a pain in the ass.
Glad that it's so far just simple problems in the long run. There's one thing that no one here should want and that's a complex problem that requires a format. :)
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Glad that it's so far just simple problems in the long run. There's one thing that no one here should want and that's a complex problem that requires a format. :)
# posted by : May 18, 2009 3:29 AM
: May 18, 2009 3:29 AMLinks to this post:
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