My PC is dying. Today was possibly the beginning of the end. The poor thing has had problems for quite some time - the motherboard chipset fan is prone to failure. It’s given out once before, and when I called the manufacturer about getting a replacement they didn’t even pause to ask questions except “What’s your address?” They promptly shipped out a new fan and I was on my way.
Well, my fan started making wacky noises a few months ago and I realized it was about time to get another one. But I’ve been mostly using my MacBook, so I never got around to it. I only turn the PC on once every few weeks at this point. Well. That was true up until a few weeks ago when I met up with Soren Johnson at AIIDE.
Soren was the lead designer as well as the main gameplay and AI engineer on Civilization IV. We had a nice long chat at the conference and it got me wanting to dig up my copy of Civ IV. I hadn’t really played it significantly when it first came up because I was in the depths of my WoW addiction. I managed to pause WoW long enough to play a few games of Civ through (and even write up a review and some more thoughts and then even more thoughts).
I’m no longer really playing WoW (yup, still WoW free. I think I’ve played once in the last 2 months) so I’m free for other games! I added a feature to the sidebar where I show what I’m playing, in fact. Civilization has been tops of that list for the last few weeks. Re-reading my initial thoughts, I don’t disagree much with my early assessment. I do think that my initial impressions of each new Civ game are always negative. “Why’d they change this? Where’s this favorite feature of mine??” Then I go away and come back to it and fall in love. It happened that way for me on Civ III and even Alpha Centauri. So my return to Civ IV has lead me to forgive it for some of the things that are different (though I still want my bullet point list from my more thoughts post implemented!).
Back to the stated topic though. I still don’t have Windows on my MacBook and I only have the Windows version of Civ IV so I’m forced to boot up my PC to play Civ. This means instead of only being turned on once every few weeks it’s been on several times a week. I was playing Civ on it last night, in fact, and it was a-ok.
Tonight I turned it on and got to the Windows loading screen with the little bar that bounces back and forth. I waited and waited. Then waited some more. Eventually the bar stopped bouncing but Windows never loaded. I rebooted and managed to load into Windows Safe Mode. “Now what?” I thought to myself. I uninstalled some stuff and removed everything from my Startup folder but to no avail. It still won’t run in un-safe mode.
Don’t really know how this could have anything to do with my failing fan, but maybe my computer overheated from the strenuous Civ workout and that caused unhappiness in the hard drive. Or somewhere else, who knows? I’m a software gal, hardware is strange and mysterious.
I’m not freaking out as much as I might expect. Probably because I love my MacBook Pro. But seriously, I need to do something about my PC. Troubleshooting tips, anyone?
One Response to “Death of a PC”
I suspect something’s causing mad heat generation on the CPU and you’re burning out fans left and right. I’d try opening up the case and pointing a small table fan at it to get it running long enough to get the data off, then replace the motherboard/cpu/memory. It’s possible that it’s something simple I don’t know about, but if your motherboard fan has been working overdrive and is burning out again, it’s likely that you’ve either got a slightly bent pin on the CPU (still will work, but causes massive thermal issues) or something else is going wacky on the board causing it to overheat.
More recent motherboards (last year or so) provide viewing of on-core and in-case temperatures and allow dialing back of fan speeds to maintain them all. If your bios supports it, it’d be worth seeing what temperature it’s at. I recently had a Core2 running at something like 85 degrees… celsius. That’s like 5 minutes to major chip destruction
Good luck! And let me know if you need to get some discount MS software to run via bootcamp…