Ok, God hates me this weekend, I’m convinced!
For starters, I’m up at 3am on Friday morning in immense amounts of pain. Didn’t get back to sleep, missed half a day of work while going to the Doctor and picking up meds. Due to everything that happened, I can’t drink, eat spicy foods, or do anything strenuous until I’m better.
So I’m pretty much stuck at home ALL FUCKING WEEKEND.
I fire up the Xbox Friday night, get pretty close to winning this race and BLAMMO, power goes out. I finish the race, then shut everything down. I go out for a few hours, have some dinner, make the mistake of betting this crazy person $20 to drink a glass of olive oil, come back home around 9:30 to find that hey, THE POWER IS STILL OUT.
The power comes back on at some point and I turn everything on (like this server) and then go to bed. Around 11:40, the power again goes out. I wake up and see that my computer is shut off, and the UPS is beeping. I didn’t think anything about it, just shut off the UPS and went back to bed.
Wake up this morning, power is back on, so I fire everything up again. I have my nice hearty bowl of fiber so I can have my daily movement, sit down and play some Xbox, and then I smell electrical burning. THere’s nothing quite like that smell. It was faint at first, then extremely strong so I stop what I’m doing and go to hunt it down.
The smell is gone, then I notice my computer is dead again. First I think the power went out, but then DUH, I have a UPS. So I turn it back on, and turn on the hardware monitor. My CPU temp rapidly goes from 40C to 65C+ so I shut it down, open it up, and find that the Vantec Tornado uber-cooling fan is uber-fucking-dead. Not only that, but the huge Thermaltake heat-sink is caked in dust, which leads me to believe that the friggin fan has been dying for awhile now, and likely when I shut everything off last night it just gave up for good.
So I take the fan off, grab a spare, clean off the heat-sink with the brush attachment on my Dremel, fire it all up and yee hah. Now of course I need a new fan, as the Cooler-Master I installed doesn’t quite push the same CFM I need to keep this monster cool. I slightly remember the Vantec box having a ‘Lifetime Warranty’ on it, so I dig up the reciept, and start filling out the RMA. Hopefully I’ll have a new fan some time this week. I like the Vantec Tornado for the obnoxious amounts of air it pushes over my heatsink. The thing would literally pick itself up off the desk when under power it was so strong.
So now, PC’s fixed, I’m slowly migrating back to my weekend getaway otherwise known as Forza Motorsport. It’s sunny otuside, the weather is beautiful, and I can’t do a DAMNED THING.
Pardon me while I kick karma in the ass…
