never let yourself be disrupted while doing important work

I´ve experienced some problems the last days while in win7, one of them being the message that my RAM is running low. I smelled trouble coming up and expected either the new graphic card or the RAM. It was a bit strange that the graphics card would be around 65°C without any load at times. No problems running ubuntu or debian. Problems with visualstudio, photoshop and most other RAM demanding applications. SNAP litterally was the last straw on the camels back and I decided to run a MemTest, in the hopes it would not be the graphics card.

So 10 minutes ago, I´m sitting here running 8 instances of memtest to check my RAM. I allocated each instance to an own core to max out the CPU and not have it cross-handle 8 instances. As I sit there watching all cores hit 100% I´m thinking to myself "I´ve actually never seen this (all cores showing 100%). I wondered why the hell it´s so silent as I expected the CPU fan to come into rage mode every second. But it was way too silent. A short moment later all screens went down and started to flicker trying to aquire a signal, going through their input channels. Like the machine rebooted but it did not reboot because it came back long anouth to see the desktop. It took me about 2-3 seconds to realize what was going on.

I jumped up, grabbed the handle of the sidepanel and tossed it away into the room . Because it was a bit dark inside the room, I touched the middle of the fan slightly to check if it´s running. It did not!!! I flicked the switch on the backside of the PS and grabbed after the CPU fan´s cablecord just to burn myself instantly on the cooling rips. Hot "new mainboard"-smelly air greeted me, too. The cooler was untouchable, it was radiating heat and the power supply case was also nearly untouchable but the lesser evil so I pressed my hand against while trying to plug in the fan..

The cooler is an Enermax ETS-T40-TB, huge thing even in a bigtower and you only have a small space to reach towards the pin-header when it´s mounted. I burned myself several times until I decided I need more light and had to run for the lightswitch. It took me a few seconds to fumble the nosed 4pin plug onto the header after that. I figured it would be best to turn the machine back on and boot into bios the check the CPU core temp and mainly, to have the fan running. As soon as the the fan came alive, a hot gust of air escaped the cooler.

When I saw the BIOS GUI slowly building up pixelblock for pixelblock, I thought damn it I lost my CPU and maybe mainboard, too. The temp was showing 96°C rapidly descending about 0,5°C/second.

Why was it unplugged?
Two weeks(!) ago I unmounted the fan on my CPU cooler to vacuum the whole tower, including the cooler fins. Shortly before I finished, I got disturbed and decided to at least fumble the clamps onto the cooler and then go answer the door.

When I came back an hour later, I put away the vacuum cleaner and closed the side hatch of my chieftech. That´s when I forgot to plug in the CPU fan into the mainboard.

I should have gone back to my stuff the second I closed the door and just say "no, I´m sorry I don´t have time for that right now". At least it seems there is no permanent damage.

Naw, you're solid as a rock.....you sir

Are getting older....44 for me when searching the floor of the shop in that one square yard area full of the tools I am using to finish the project and needed my ratchet wrench with the socket on it....looked for an hour almost five times.....it was found on top of the center of the tools....my eyes,,,,no my brain was responsible..it was right there!

a reply to: verschickter

Twice in the last year i have opened up a computer to find it looks like the inside of a vacuum ? cleaner was emptied inside ,the worst offender was my mother who had a HP desktop on the bottom of a computer desk sucking up all the dog hair ,lucky i opened it up to put more ram into it as it was inches thick and resembled what comes from the tumble dryer and should have gone on fire ,luck was with me .

I got a great deal on Ebay of a quad core computer lately the last owner sad it was slow , might have has something to do with the 1 gb of ram it came with or the fact it was packed with dirt and hair

After I answered the door, I got distraced by other stuff and aprox. An hour later, totally unaware that I had still stuff to do inside the case, I walked inside the room and had to jump the second time over the damn vacuum cleaner so I put it away, closed the sidepanel and went on with other things. I don´t even blame the one at the door, it´s clearly my fault if I let myself get distracted.

I´m not sure if instantly rebooted the machine then but one thing is for sure, that CPU ran almost two weeks without an active cooler. Yeah.. did you know that men begin to rot from the inside out after a certain amount trips around the sun?

originally posted by: verschickter
Yeah.. did you know that men begin to rot from the inside out after a certain amount trips around the sun?

Wait what i am on round 52

It is the oven that is my Achilles heel , i put it on and get totally distracted and i get biblical burnt offerings for food

a reply to: stonerwilliam

Biblical burnt offerings will keep you in top form better it's the new way....better than the way we had before

a reply to: GBP/JPY

Thats ok, I have actually looked for something ( my keys ) with them in my hand.........

a reply to: SituationNAFU

Basically it´s very simple to find stuff if you know this rule: It´s always at the last place you look. haha...

fan dust screens there worth it

my bios are set to shut down at 65c

a reply to: markovian

I was actually surprised the BIOS didn´t scream at me because

a) no PWM signal
b) no current draw

I concluded since watercooling systems can be made passive, this could be the reason why the BIOS did not bother that there was no PWM signal coming back and no current draw from any fan.

In future instead of reaching for the fan plug, reach for the power switch and get that sucker powered down ASAP before you do anything else.

a reply to: AtomicKangaroo
I did that.

I jumped up, grabbed the handle of the sidepanel and tossed it away into the room . Because it was a bit dark inside the room, I touched the middle of the fan slightly to check if it´s running. It did not!!! I flicked the switch on the backside of the PS and grabbed after the CPU fan´s cablecord just to burn myself instantly on the cooling rips.

a reply to: verschickter

Sorry my bad. I generally tend to read things properly but I dun goofed and glanced through it.

im stripping down computers as we speak. Two mother boards failed. Retrieve the hard drives and throw rest away. Then theres software problems. Two much crap loading up on started, conflicting IRQs and problems with power saving modes and video adaptors shutting monitor down. There use to be a time when computers were reliable.