Ryan's Journal

One of the old machines I used to run looks like it's coming back to life. I had to take bleeding-gums down when it started to fail erratically. All attempts at diagnosis were futile as it never made it far enough to tell me what was happening. I gave up for the moment, thinking some critical piece of hardware was in its death throes, requiring spare time and parts to fix, none of which I had.

Yesterday I had some time. So I took the machine out of its rack and cracked it open to get an idea of what might be wrong. Nothing looked burned or broken, and it booted up fine. Except the grinding. The fans were grinding. None of the fans inside were doing any real work. The computer had overheated, and I couldn't diagnose it then because the machine room was too loud to hear any fan (or lack of fan) problems, and the computer was too hot to get very far in the boot process. And apparently I don't have any temperature sensors inside.

I can probably run down to the nearest PC shop and get this thing back online for $10. Not bad. Maybe I should throw in more RAM and disk while I'm at it...