Yesterday my computer died. Again.

The single most popular PC ailment I’ve suffered from historically is failed fans which caused burnt CPUs, chipsets, motherboards, etc. On one notorious occasion I had to replace my whole motherboard, CPU and memory because of a malfunctioning CPU fan. And this is what I suspected yesterday, since my CPU fan wasn’t working well. I brought it back to life with WD-40 but the PC still wouldn’t start, so I already accepted the sad fact that the CPU probably died (AMD CPUs have one big disadvantage - no normal thermal shutdown feature). When I turned the PC on it would just repeat one long beep and wouldn’t even turn the screen on.

Luckily I decided to double check before heading to the PC lab. I checked what the beep means from my parents’ PC when we visited them for lunch, and it turned out (from a couple of sources) that it probably means a memory problem, rather than CPU.

Strangely, it helped. Once I moved one of the chips around to another slot, it started working. So now I have my PC back again, without the need to do a costly upgrade.

Related posts:

1. CPR to my computer, again
2. sloppy code, SourceForge CVS, memory manager
3. Book review: “The memory keeper’s daughter” by Kim Edwards

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 07:45 and is filed under Hardware & Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.