Thursday, June 14, 2007
It's cold.
Too cold. Far too freakin' cold. How do I know? Well, apart from the fact that I feel frozen, so does my home computer. I tried switching it on. A number of times. Wouldn't start up. Fan would whizz for a second or so (or 5 seconds sometimes!) and then it would give up. Too cold. How do I know it was the cold? I pointed a fan-forced heater at the inside of the box (i.e. at the motherboard) for about 15 minutes. Tried at about 5 mins, didn't make a difference, but by the time the case was hot to touch (on the other side of the motherboard) it started up just fine. By just fine I mean that it was complaining that the CPU and motherboard were too hot, but it booted perfectly. I'm a little worried about "fixing" my computer by heating it up, but hey it worked.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
wow! you guys really have temperamental appliances! Maybe you should blow dry the TV?
xxx
huh... have you tried wrapping it in a little pooter blankie overnight, then maybe giving it a mug of cocoa about 10 min before you want to start it up? ;-)
And just for amusement, my computer won't work in the heat.
Ok, spraying the boards with Can-o-cold to see which chip was overheating - like we used to do in my days in a test lab - I can understand, but whats the rationale behind computers being too _cold_ to run? Just couldn't be buggered to get out of bed I guess...
Yeah it isn't traditional to pump hot air into a computer to get it to work but hey... it did!
It's clearly the capacitor fluid freezing up! That or the resistor grease becoming a bit to viscous...
Actually, it occurs to me that one of the reasons we used to cold blast things was to try to see which bit of the board had connections too close together; the heat would cause them to expand and make connections they werent supposed to make. Maybe your machine has a micro break in something thats supposed to be connected, and the heat causes it to close the gap? You need a really directional heat source, so you can try to tell which bit is undercooked...
Post a Comment