Computer Meltdown (restoration)

As you might know by now that I like build­ing my own com­put­er and cus­tomiz­ing it as per my require­ments rather than buy­ing one of a rack. I am also a proud geek and love to read posts such as how to spot a Fund Me Scam? As this not just helps me to get an insight into the mis­use of social media but also gives me an oppur­tu­ni­ty to edu­cate you about it.

As you may recall from my Computer Meltdown (lit­er­al­ly) post, this past Wednesday I burnt out not only my computer’s pow­er sup­ply, but its CPU, the CPU fan, and three case fans. The CPU chip was burnt so bad­ly that it scorched the moth­er­board around it. The CPU chip, with noth­ing but the heatsink for cool­ing, reached 186°.

Apparently the CPU fan and the pow­er sup­ply had been fail­ing by degrees for some time. For months now I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with the sys­tem crash­ing or reboot­ing (with or with­out a Blue Screen of Death) and after hav­ing a call with the IT Support Springfield team, I came to know that the crash­es occurred as reg­u­lar­ly as Old Faithful dur­ing peri­ods of high sys­tem activ­i­ty such as when play­ing the only video game in which I indulge, Halo, or dur­ing sys­tem main­te­nance cycles like defrag­men­ta­tion and back­ing up to my exter­nal FireWire dri­ve. Being much more com­fort­able with soft­ware than with hard­ware, I had approached the prob­lem from a soft­ware angle: I trou­bleshot the OS, my user pro­file, video and sound dri­vers, my main­te­nance sched­ul­ing pro­gram, and so on. Nothing solved the crash prob­lem. Now I under­stand why; it was hardware.

The exces­sive heat cou­pled with, and caused by, high pow­er con­sump­tion dur­ing these stren­u­ous activies caused the sys­tem to protest by rebooting.

Now, how­ev­er, I sit beside a much cool­er sys­tem with a larg­er pow­er sup­ply. This goal was reached through much frus­tra­tion and two trips to Fry’s; at least one more trip is in the near future. I’ll get to that.

I hired Tom to fix the sys­tem. He took my sys­tem, found the melt­down prob­lems, and believed he had fixed them. When I got the sys­tem home late Thursday night, how­ev­er, I found it still would­n’t work. On the rare occas­sion when it would boot into the BIOS (what’s called “post­ing”), an error was gen­er­at­ed stat­ing that the CPU set­tings were incor­rect or invalid. Tom hypoth­e­sized that the com­put­er case itself was to blame. When he had demon­strat­ed the func­tion­al­i­ty of the sys­tem pri­or to return­ing it to me, he had had the moth­er­board com­plete­ly removed from the case. Then, with the mid-tower case sit­ting on its side, it had post­ed once more at Tom’s. When I got it home, set the tow­er ver­ti­cal­ly as it was intend­ed, and plugged every­thing in, it would­n’t post (at least not with­out the afore­men­tioned error).

Tom had installed a new pow­er sup­ply, new CPU chip, new CPU fan, and three new case fans. For extra safe­ty he set all the case fans to blow out of the case, front and back, as opposed to the usu­al set­up where­in fans suck in from the front and blow out through the back, cre­at­ing a cool­ing tun­nel. This cre­at­ed a neg­a­tive pres­sure zone with­in the case, the main ben­e­fit of which was that it would keep out debris (e.g. cat hair). Everything sound­ed great! As I men­tioned, it would­n’t post.

So, I spent a lit­tle while with the Classifieds (the hard­copy kind ’cause you need a com­put­er to access Monster​.com) look­ing for a job not relat­ed to com­put­ers. I did­n’t qual­i­fy for garbage col­lec­tor posi­tion because I had­n’t a degree in Waste Management or Custodial Engineering. I don’t have enough zits to be qual­i­fied as a McDonald’s fry cook. I real­ly could­n’t see me sell­ing bongs in the local head­shop. And, Sperm Bank Technician just icked me out.

Strawberry Blonde con­vinced me not to give up on com­put­ers all togeth­er, and Friday we took a dri­ve to Fry’s Electronics, the elec­tron­ics super­store, the Toys R’ Us for grown-ups.

Tom had stat­ed that he believed my com­put­er case was at fault. Of this he was absolute­ly con­vinced. That it had devel­oped “a lean” that was caus­ing ground­ing issues with the pow­er flow through­out the sys­tem. So, after every­thing, the case itself was at fault for the whole melt­down. Since I’m a soft­ware guy and he a hard­ware guy, I trust­ed him.

At Fry’s we bought a new case (see pho­tos). For the geeks: The case is a RaidMax ATX298WSTP front USB 2.0 case with four exter­nal 5.25″ bays, two exter­nal 3.5″ bays, four inter­nal 3.5″ bays, one AGP slot, and five PCI slots. It comes with a 350w RaidMax pow­er sup­ply, which we dumped in favor of my new EnLight 420w. As you can see from the pho­tos, the large pow­er but­ton (front-bottom) lights up, as does the includ­ed blue cold-cathode light I mount­ed above the pho­to­sen­si­tive side fans below the win­dow (side view). The entire case is paint­ed like mat­te sil­ver, with the front pan­el and bay cov­ers brushed steele and cov­ered with ¼ inch-thick clear plex­i­glass that, from the beveled sides, appears to glow blue (with­out elec­tric­i­ty). Hidden in front of the inter­nal 3.5″ hard­drive bays is space for four case fans. I’ve installed two diag­o­nal­ly. With the two intake fans hid­den in the front, the two side out­take fans, and the pow­er sup­ply’s paired intake and out­take fans, the case has a total of six fans. The ATI Rage Fury Pro Ti 4200 has its own onboard fan, as does the CPU and the BIOS chip. I’m told the Vantec AeroFlow Tip-Magnetic-Driving, 5600 RPM fan atop the CPU will out­live this and my next two sys­tems. It’s a cooled sys­tem. Just to be absolute­ly sure the case is cool, it comes with a dig­i­tal ther­mal meter (front, top bay) which dis­plays the inter­nal tem­per­a­ture in user-selectable Fahrenheit or Celsius.

I real­ly like how the case match­es the steele shelves that com­prise my office.

Back to the tale… The more I thought about it, the more I won­dered how the hell a case could cause so much trou­ble. The CPU error mes­sages fueled my doubt about the case being at fault. So, while wait­ing for Tom Saturday, Strawberry Blonde and I took anoth­er dri­ve down to Fry’s. There we pur­chased a new moth­er­board, new CPU chip, and new RAM to fit the moth­er­board. When Tom looked at the sys­tem Saturday after all the stores closed, I want­ed to have on hand all the parts we might need to replace; I did not want to be stuck wait­ing until the next day to get parts, then, after that, wait­ing again until Tom could once more look at the system.

Saturday evening I cart­ed my old sys­tem, exact­ly as Tom had left it, along with the new case, new moth­er­board, new CPU, new RAM, and some oth­er lit­tle stuff over to Tom’s house. While tear­ing down the old sys­tem he proved his lean the­o­ry. When he tried to remove a rail-mounted hard­drive (I have a pair of 80GB dri­ves inter­nal), he found that one was stuck. The case has warped slight­ly, as evi­denced by the fact that he had to strain to remove the rail-mounted dri­ve from the bay. Ok. I learned some­thing new.

The new case works per­fect­ly. It boots with­out error mes­sages. At the height of use (I had Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, HomeSite 5.5, four brows­er win­dows, and a few oth­er things run­ning all at once) the sys­tem tem­per­a­ture has remained in the mid-ninety degree range. More impor­tant­ly, I played Halo for about an hour with­out a sin­gle crash (it would usu­al­ly crash at least twice an hour), then ran all back­up rou­tines. The sys­tem did­n’t even bitch once. Now we must make anoth­er trip to Fry’s (twen­ty min­utes each way) to return the excess com­po­nents. While there we’ll pick up anoth­er giga­byte of RAM for me and some new fans for Strawberry Blonde. I’ll be swap­ping the RaidMax 350w pow­er sup­ply for her aging 300w. Fortunately today is Super Bowl Sunday, so all the foot­ball fans will be glued to their couch­es while we’re at guy heav­en. Should be a quick trip.

Wish us luck!

Oh, and please par­don the mess evi­dent in the pho­tos. My office is usu­al­ly very neat, with all the com­put­er, print­er, stereo, etc. wires com­plete­ly hid­den (I am an absolute mas­ter with zip-ties). For repair and test­ing, how­ev­er, I pulled all the cords out into the open and made a mess of the rest of the area.