May 2005 Archives

 Well this was strange. My main system I use kept periodically shutting down for no apparent reason. I checked for the usual virus, what was running on the system at time of shutdown etc...

There was no pattern to the shutdowns. I had the latest virus protection and had upgraded my Windows XP Pro to the latest levels of updates. I looked in the event logs and saw some references to the video driver so I downloaded and started to update the video driver. During the video driver update the system cut-off again!

 Well this time it would not boot all the way back up but kept cutting off before the system could complete the bios load. After a while it did not boot at all!! The system stopped even powering up!

 I then went and got a spare power supply I had not used in a while and that also failed to power the system up. This is when I started smelling the aroma of burnt silicon. My next step was to promptly unplug my system and power supply. I tried a few more items but since it was late (3am) I went to bed.

Now this is what really threw me down the wrong path is that when I woke up and came into my computer room My hubs, routers and system in my 19” rack where down. My UPS I had bought at a computer swap would not come back up! I unplugged everything and went to the old standby surge protectors. My systems and hubs came back up.

Since I have had issues with power the past few months and had moved things around and considerably reconfigured the power structure in the room I figured this was a contributing factor to my system failure.

That day at lunch I purchased another 550w ATX power supply. Tracking down my power supply manufacture of the power supply I thought had failed produced another side story. The company’s web site listed on the side of the box was not active and they had no address or other information about the company on or in the box! I had to go to the store and convince the place I had bought the power supply from seven months ago to call their buyers of the power supply and get the number to the company I had bought the power supply from! Even the current boxes on the stores shelves had the unreachable website and no other company information!! I called the company and they had changed the companies URL but had no other information on the web site listed on all their power supplies currently in the stores pointing to the new site or anything about the company! More to come on this issue later!

Now the real craziness begins. I took the power supply home and of course was met with the same results as before. The system would chirp quickly not even spin the system fans one revolution and quit!

            I then thought well maybe it was some other device but after isolating the system to its barest components just to see if the CPU fans would spin I thought I had either a faulty mother board or a failed CPU.

A couple of days later I went and purchased a new mother board & CPU along with memory. The new configuration powered up fine with my power supply.  Problem solved correct?? Well during this time I had decided to try and trouble shoot my old mother board again and see if it was just bad memory since I felt maybe I needed to blow out all my part and reseat everything and presto my original mother board powered up!! Ok I’m out of a little money but happy. I started building up my old system in the case after blowing it out with canned air. I then tried to power it back up and the thing started cutting off on me again when I got into the OS. Then after a while each time it would cut off a little quicker.

            Now I made sure that everything was properly connected and seated in the case and in the respective connections and still the system kept cutting off.  I again started isolating components to determine the issue. I then noticed that I had failed to clean one item and since I had the canned air I decided to correct this issue and buy me some time to think.

 I took out the CPU fan which looked like it had a fine layer of dust on it off the CPU. I looked at the CPU and noticed that in the fins of the heat sync with the fan on top was more dust than I anticipated! I blew all of the dust out of the CPU fan and placed it back on the system. Surprise of all surprises the system came up and has not shut down since. This has only been 24 hours but it would not even stay up for all my systems to load when it hadn't been powered up after the system was cooled down. When not cooled down it would not even power up!

Now I looked at the design of the whole CPU cooling apparatus. Basically the CPU fan is drawing air to cool the CPU into the heat sinks and if any dust particles are in the air it was getting trapped against the CPU and motherboard! This is an Intel 3.2 GB P4 478 pin system but I imagine this may happen to many other CPU’s.

Now I will build my AMD 64 bit 3200 system and move the 3.2 GB to one of my other systems as I said in the post before eventually but now I can wait a bit and take my time and work on other projects.

The lesson learned CLEAN and BLOW OUT the CPU FAN otherwise it can cause your CPU to OVERHEAT!!