CPU toast

Just a day after thinking of getting a new machine I had my computer die on me as I was working on it. Thankfully I wasn't doing anything critically important at the time and didn't suffer any data loss.

I quickly unplugged the machine and found the processor heat sink to be too hot to touch. The computer refused to start up again even though the mother board LEDs were lit up. I feared I had a toast mother board or processor in my hands.

The CPU was under warranty and I quickly removed the MB and CPU combo and rushed to store where I bought it from, only to find that it boots when plugged into one of their casings. To my embarrasment the technician assesed the problem to be with the casing or power supply. I ruled out the power supply as being responsible because the mother board LED was being lit up. Apparently that can happen with ATX supplies.

Like any good geek I had a couple of burnt out systems lying around and on getting back home I trash one of them and took out the power supply to plug in to my current system and hey presto everythign is up and running. Fortunately the hard disks were not effected anyway I use reiser or ext3 on my file system and these are pretty good at error recovery.

I finally managed to get back to work after nearly 12 hours of inactivity caused by the failure of a $25 componnet. Ouch.