When it hits the fan
Monday of last week my son tells me his PC is locked up. I check it out and sure enough the keyboard and mouse are off. No power to them. The CPU fan is just screeming. I do a reboot and think everything is fine, but 2 minutes later the CPU fan starts spinning faster and faster and faster. Then the keyboard and mouse go dead again, sound stops playing and the screen is frozen. Not good. I shut it down and boot it up on Tuesday and it hasn't locked yet, but it does not sound good. Now his PC is my hand me down Alienware. It's a P4 @ 2.8 with 4GB of RAM. Plenty for what he does on the PC, but getting old. I think I'll have to replace it.
On Tuesday I turn on entertainment system to watch TV and the signal is interlaced. I did some testing and found that when this happens I can turn off/on the xbox 360, the stereo or the TV and it will show up correctly. So I think it's an HDMI issue (everything goes into the stereo as HDMI which then sends to the TV via HDMI). On Thursday the TV will not display at all. Just a "check input" error. After testing with another TV I have determined that the HDMI input on the TV has gone bad. I called a TV repair shop. He says that Samsung uses 1 digital input board on this TV that has been known to go bad (which I did see people talking about online). Cost is about $250 to replace it, so still cheaper than the $2,000 TV I want.
Early this week my wife's check engine light came on. A computer check says the #4 cylinder is not firing. I talked to a mechanic friend of mine who suggested replacing the spark plugs and swapping 2 of the coils to see if the issue goes away or moves to another cylinder. I did that today and there was no change except that it's running rougher than even yesterday. After some testing with a guy from AutoZone we discover that when we pulled the spark plug out of #4 there is antifreeze on the tip - Blown head gasket.
On another note, I did get You Don't Know Jack for the wii. Not quite as fun as the PC versions, but still worth the money. And yes I do remember how fun the PC versions were, I introduced my son to them about 3 months ago.
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Dan:
February 13th, 2011 - 03:10
Of course this means YOU get a new computer and he gets your old one.
February 13th, 2011 - 07:26
I can’t say that thought hasn’t crossed my mind. I have to balance the cost vs. the upgrade I would get. My PC is only about 6 months old. I’m running an i7 860 as it is. I really don’t need anything faster. So I could upgrade my CPU and build him a new PC using this one at $$ or I could build him a new one using an i3 CPU for $. I definitly need to put some numbers together and see what the real costs would be both ways, but I’m guessing I’ll save the money considering the other repairs I’ve got right now.