Again, not what you're thinking.
I assumed due to the noises coming out of my hard drive that when my computer started shutting itself off every 20 mins. or so, that the hard drive was failing. Why I used that as an excuse to replace the monitor with a shiny flat screen model well, let's just say we'd have to dig deeper into my shopaholic, gottahaveit psyche than I care to go. Of course, when that didn't work, I had to pony up the cash to actually replace the drive. Which I did, but then spent an entire day deleting programs and trying to ghost my original drive over to the new one. Not so easy when you're working in 20 minute intervals. I finally succeeded. In celebration I also decided to double the memory as long as I had the guts exposed. And yesterday I happily connected my new 300G hard drive to my system and fired it up. And nothing happened. Just a series of forlorn beeps. After determining that the hard drive wasn't installed wrong, I was afraid that after all my hard work that I had installed the wrong memory and fragged the whole thing. In desperation, I called the fine folks over at Kingston. Tech support patiently talked me through the fix, without once making fun of the fact that I amatuerishly installed the memory wrong. Problem solved.
Again, I happily re-connected all the peripherals and got to re-installing my programs... 20 minutes later it died. At first, I thought that the problem was actually a virus or some malicious program that had sneaked in. But I'm pretty careful about not letting my computer get The AIDS. Finally I had the sense to Google up "PC shuts down repeatedly" and was led to a series of articles all saying the same thing. My system was probably overheating because a fan wasn't working. After blowing out the entire case with compressed gas, and trying but failing to get it fixed that way, I took the radical step of taking off the cover and turning on the PC and having a look. The CPU fan didn't even twitch. The fan not working was making the CPU overheat and the system was shutting itself off to protect itself.
10 dollars later (not counting the $200 monitor and the $80 hard drive and the $35 memory upgrade) my PC is, in fact, good enough to last several more years. If I want, I can even take that old creaky hard drive and use it for additional storage. What anyone needs with 440gigs of storage I'll never know.
Skills acquired:
How to shop for and PROPERLY INSTALL memory.
How to install a hard drive.
How to ghost a hard drive.
How to remove and replace a CPU fan.
Where the motherboard battery is located and what it looks like.
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