Q: Yesterday afternoon when a coworker was telling you that computer processing chips were about to have a substantial price drop, you complained that of course this would happen only after you needed to replace a series of computer deaths that had ended. Were you being a complete idiot?
A: Yes.
Q: What was that horrible grumbling, whirring, grinding sound coming from Clancy’s computer, Mousse, sporadically over the last few weeks?
A: That was the prolonged death whale of Mousse’s fan.
Q: What was that awful burning smell that consumed the apartment this morning?
A: That was Mousse, possibly dying.
Update: When it rains it pours. I was preparing Yoma for Clancy to replace Mousse and Yoma’s fan started sputtering and emitting that too familiar burnt odor. What are the odds that two fans would go bad within 24 hours of one another?
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5 Responses to Q & A: Mousse’s Death Whale
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I have been thinking of doing a full-scale upgrade on my system for a while now.
Pros: I can get a ton of processing power and video board, etc, for very little money.
Cons: I don’t want to spend even that kind of money till I’ve got other debts paid off (and if I can use that as an excuse for the 6 months it’ll take to pay them off, I can get even more machine for the same money).
Ancillary: I’ve been using the same (256 MB, fully DirectX 9.0c compliant) graphics card for years. Its memory speed STILL beats most of the cards on the market today. If I upgrade, I have to switch from AGP to PCI-X and I lose that graphics card.
Ancillary Ancillary: I need a new power supply. My 450 is “just” low enough that attaching my motherboard, powered video board, DVD drive, DVD +/-R drive, and four hard drives pushes it to the brink. It’s “okay” with a mere three hard drives. But I’d really rather have a power supply that doesn’t have blue glowing LED’s either.
The fact that I will have to replace my perfectly good video card and RAM with a new motherboard and processor is quite a disincentive for me.
I don’t trust 450 power supplies anymore. I hate doing it, but I always buy excessively powerful onces because I’ve been burned with power supplies that are not quite good enough.
When I got the 450, it was “excessive”… then I added a new DVD drive (replaced a mere CD burner and external DVD-drive that was a casualty of fire) and two more hard drives.
Power builds up over time.
It’s funny how power used to never be an issue. So much so that I could be mostly ignorant as to what a good or bad power supply was. Maybe Colosse just had a really good power grid, but in Deseret and Estacado both it’s been the #1 fixable source of computer problems.
Funny you should say that – I keep almost everything (computer, roommate’s computer, alarm clock, entertainment center in living room) on battery backup units simply because Colosse’s power grid (at least in our current locale) is so shoddy.
Yes, the alarm clock is on a battery backup supply. I got tired of changing the 9-volt and these particular battery backups (Belkin 550VA) were coming from a supplier at $25 apiece.
I may purchase a couple more shortly.