A word of warning!!

Short version:

If you hear your CPU or internal fan whirring - it may already be too late - change it now! Otherwise potentially go through the four days of 'PC Hell' I have just gone through, all over a £3.99 fan.


Long Version:
Noisey fan - it'll be alright... then sometime later my PC shuts down...ot oh!

I thought it''l be okay I'll reboot - hmm where's my profile gone and why does my PC not remember any information, and where are my e-mails?

I'll check some hard disk properties...oops why does right mouse click cause my pc to install some software randomly? Thats not right!

Oh, I thought it must be due to an ageing hard drive...
I'll pop down to PC World and get me a special offer 200GB for £64. 00 this week - lucky me! ha!

So old drive now replaced, with brand spanking new drive ready to install XP... Hard Drive apparently was too big for my 4 year old BIOS to recognise... and when I realised and upgraded my BIOS (thanks Mousey for being there all weekend - especially all day Sunday for me!!!) then Windows XP was unable to recognise the 200GB drive - it reported 131054MB only...(Apparently only XP with SP2 built in recognises bigger than 127GB drives in one partition)... Where was my other 70GB????

Man at PC World whittered on about old PCs not upgradeable beyond a certain limit - Bah! Rubbish I thought... I have an Athlon 1900+ 768MB RAM, Socket A Mother Board, should be no problems...

so some time later...after two more re-installs of Windows XP and still problems occurring...the machine locks up again. (I must be really stupid).

I re-boot and continue to work on the theory that somehow I may have done something inadvertently...it stops again... I update to SP2, full McAfee Security Suite, latest drivers...hold on that nosiy fan seems to have quietened down a bit now, that's good....or is it...er hold on let me have a look at the BIOS temperatures.....ARGGGGGGGGGGGHHH

It had gone quiet because it is no longer rotating at a speed required to cool the cpu....

oops!

So here we are three installs later

Penny drops - fan not work, cpu overheat, PC shutdown, XP re-install failes each time to due overheating...get new fan...start again, Happy Bunny!

The End.

So, as I said earlier, if you hear your fans being noisy please, replace them, £3.99 from Maplin for a Socket A CPU fan replacement - took me half an hour in the car and 10 mins to fit it...would have saved me four days of striffe.

Ah well you would think after a good few years of working with PC's I would know better, but I didn't!


IPete2.

I did that with my power supply, till it burnt out and my room smelled for ages... :oS Good advice there :D

Doesn't your BIOS have automatic shutdown temperature settings?

One of my older PCs my mom bought around 6 years ago (during the Windows ME era) wouldnt allow me to install any other operating system other than Windows ME(even after updating the bios....etc).....now THAT sucked....
The best thing about it was that even after continuous fresh reformats and installs....give it a month and Windows ME will never fail to go into never-ending-crash-lockup-bsod-mode......

My PC only seems to whir on a cold-boot, then 2/3rds through the boot-up sequence, the whirring goes away, whether it means the fan has warmed up, or stopped altogether, I have yet to figure out. ;P

Not going to bother to look at it until my PC starts doing weird things, not a wise decision, but hey, I'm lazy.

maybe you should invest a bit more than 4 bucks...maybe... ;)

My PC started making a whirring noise about 3 months ago which has been worrying me a bit... how can you tell which component is struggling? At first i figured it was the hard drive but it could equally be the PSU or CPU fan... how to tell??

I've lost a computer to this. My poor old 486. I really miss it.

Jams, if your hard drive disks were wobbling at all, your
computer wouldn't run at all, so it's got to be one of the
other two.

[edit]
I also lost my 9800 pro twice to a faulty fan before I switched to a 6800 gt.

it could be any one of a number of fans... cpu, gpu, auxilliary cooling...

one of mine does the same as Genexi's... whirs for a few seconds on a cold boot... then goes quiet for the rest of the time...

--Mike

either stick your head in it or use your pc microphone to listen to each fan through the speakers, kinda like a pc stethoscope :)

I think this happens on most temp intelligent bioses esp. laptops, fan goes full pelt until the temp is registered by the bios and then is slowed down to save power.

Funnily enough I got home today to discover I need a new fan for my old mesh psu, specs for this machine are in the sig. Makig some very weird noises, I know its the psu cos I opened it and stopped the cpu, grf card and two case fans and the noise was still there.

Anyone know where I can get one, or should I just replace the psu?