JanJans Blog

As if I hadn't had enough work already! Today, while I was merrily toiling away on my computer, I suddenly heard a crack, a clonk and then about half a minute later the sound of an emergency shutdown, initiated by the temperature protection of the main board. Well, at last now I know it really works.

So, what had happened? Because I never put the lid back on after the disk where I installed Windows had died and I had removed it from the drive bay, opening the case up was done quite fast. One look and I knew what was wrong: The CPU cooler had fallen off and was now lying inside the tangled mess of cables. Lucky me, I never had replaced the zip ties. Otherwise the cooler would have hit the graphics card and probably shorted out something, or worse, damaged the board.


After removing the cooler completely I quickly found out the reason why it had come loose in the first place: The little plastic nose that holds the retaining clip has sheered off. Probably all those cycles of warming up and cooling down again has not been kind to the plasticiser. Well, it has been 13 years!

Now, what to do, what to do? Somewhere in my archive of broken computer parts I still have an ASUS board with an old Athlon X2 on it that has a matching cooling mount thingy. One with screws and a backplate even, not that cheap clip-on rubbish! So I got out my trusty screw drivers and removed my board from the case, removed the old mount, then put in the "new" one, and finally refitted the stock cooler. Lo and behold: It works!


Lucky for me the CPU does not seem to have taken any serious damage, I used it for the rest of the day after that and there were no crashes or other abnormalities. Seems like I plugged in everything the right side up again after reinstalling the board and the cards.

Nonetheless, I guess it's time to really start thinking about new hardware. Hopefully the chip shortage will come to an end within the next year or so, at least that's what everybody is predicting right now. So hopefully I may not have to pay those overinflated prices. Hopefully! I shouldn't jinx it, it's really an old system and it has seen a lot of use, so it may die any day. Well, at least I got the chance to remove all those dust bunnies from the coolers...