The Culprit

in #technology2 years ago

IMG_3897-xsw.jpg

The last couple of weeks have been a bit stressful. Technology is a good thing when it works, and disaster when it fails. Especially when you rely upon said technology for your communications, banking and work.

My PC which I had purchased brand new back in March was busy churning away with the Sheepit Blender Render Farm, when disaster struck.

I had upped the number of processor cores it was allowed to use. (No, I don't have an all singing all dancing GPU card yet, as my budget fell short.) The PC hung.

Waiting... nothing... wait some more... then hard reset... then nothing...

LEDs lit up, fans turned, but no BIOS, no Boot, no Nothing.

Pulling various components didn't provide results, which left the CPUs and the mainboard as the suspects. After online searches and asking various people, it seemed the course of action was to disassemble the whole PC, rebuild and start it piece by piece to find what was failing.

In the mean time, I had to fallback to my laptop, which has issues of it's own and overheats. So my access to the digital world felt precarious.

The CPUs were an issue, as I don't have the thermal paste to mount the heat sinks again. I opted for the "easy" way out and hand it over to a repair shop and let them deal with the monotony of piece by piece assembly... but "pandemics" and business don't mix. When I did finally find someone, it sat on his shop floor for days because he was sick with ???

The company who sold me the PC was notoriously difficult to contact and respond. Finally when I received a response, after two weeks, their suggestion based upon my description was to check the CPU cables at the top of the machine.

At this point I still had not fully disassembled the PC, but upon looking through the cooling grill at the top... oh what is that there...?

IMG_3895-xsw.jpg

Bingo! Culprit discovered, the CPU power extension cable had burnt out at the socket, and thankfully not at the mainboard. A very expensive replacement cable exchanged position with the fried one.

Now the moment of truth. Power on... screen blank... ah sh..., hand on check the mainboard error code, hey!, voila! up comes the BIOS screen, boot options, and finally the OS loads. Huge sigh of relief.

We are so dependent upon our digital tools these days. I could continue to paint, but then promoting or selling it, which I do online would complicated.

I do keep my data backed up to external devices, so at least if I really had to, I could access my data via someone else's computer if they were kind enough to let me use it.

What would you do if your computer went down? How long would it take you to get back to business as usual?

Sort:  

Good to hear you ware able to fix it!

It took a while, but I stopped stressing over it, and then the solution came.

Dear @leoplaw,

Do you mind supporting the HiveBuzz proposal for 2022 so our team can continue its work next year?
You can do it on Peakd, ecency,

Hive.blog / https://wallet.hive.blog/proposals
or using HiveSigner.
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/199

We wish you a Happy New Year!