Bloody PCs
This PC was overheating, and by overheating I mean 'athlon automatically turning itself off before it melts if high load applications are running'.
So I decided to do the thing a sensible person would have done a long time ago.
Clean the heatsink.
Just a little word on the heatsink.
It's not one of these annoying clippy on ones that make you just about break the motherboard before you can get it on or off. It screws on, making (theoretically) taking it on and off really really easy.
The manufacturers claimed that.
They were wrong.
This is because of the way it was mounted onto the motherboard; the nuts keeping the mounting on had come off, so when you attempted to unscrew it, it just turned in its hole and did nothing.
Decided to give up trying to take heatsink off. Heatsink was cleaned, played Rise of Nations on Sam's PC against Giles, who was using my other PC.
Tried to turn PC on.
Didn't work.
Realised that the heatsink wasn't attached well enough to the processor.
Realised that I would have to take the whole computer apart.
Swore a bit.
Out went the graphics card, sound card, hard drives et al.
Spent a good while detaching the motherboard, while waiting for giles to get pliars from downstairs so we could get the mountings off the heatsink and put them back on the motherboard.
Spent a further good while waiting for Giles to return.
Put heatsink mounts on, put motherboard back, about to put heatsink back on but then
remember that I didn't put the insulatory washers on the heatsink mount.
Decide that motherboard short circuiting is only slightly more annoying than having to take motherboard off all over again.
Repeat above process.
Back in goes everything else.
Turn on.
And amazingly I'm alive to tell this story, now happily listening to MP3's using my Microsoft Media keyboard.
But this thing's still a bastard.
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