dead machine

[cellio]

As I mentioned before, my computer has been spontaneously rebooting lately. I didn't have time to pop the case and poke at hardware before Shabbat, so I just powered it down and figured I'd deal with it Saturday night.

Saturday night I wanted to check email, and mean time between failures had been several hours during the week. (I'd been turning it off when not in use.) Saturday, it rebooted after 10 minutes, and this time I got a blue screen telling me to check hardware connections (first actual feedback I'd gotten). So I popped the case, had Dani visually inspect, made sure everything was tight (the DVD drive had been a bit loose), dusted (there wasn't much), and fired it up. It stayed up without problems all evening, so I thought that had fixed it and left it turned on.

Early this morning we were awakened by beeping. It was the alternating-pitch beeping that sounds sort of like the sound trucks make when backing up, so it took a while to wake up enough to realize that the sound was coming from inside the house. The machine now wouldn't boot at all, or even seem to power up. At the very least, I suspect the power supply. I wonder if a gradually-failing power supply could cause the other problems I was seeing.

It's still under warranty, so we took it back to CompUSA this afternoon. It took forever (the person manning the repair desk didn't seem to be especially ept), but eventually she got it registered and verified that it's under warranty and so on. In theory, I'll hear something in 2-3 days.

I'm typing this from Doornail, the predecessor machine. I guess it's not such an apropos name after all; it's not dead as a doornail, after all, but it measures uptime before overheat/failure in tens of minutes. It's been going now for almost an hour, which is way above the average it was maintining when I replaced it. I don't know what's wrong with Doornail, but it's old enough that it's not worth spending a lot of money finding out. (Doornail is the machine that endured the power surge or lightning strike or whatever last year. That strike also caused me to replace the UPS, as the one I had obviously didn't do its job.)

I think I'll post this before Doornail fails. My friends list will have to wait.

Comments

[cellio]

Thanks for the information and suggestions! I'll be sure to post when I find out what the problem is.