Last night, I attended a LAN party hosted by my friend David. Since I have been an exclusive Mac user for the past year and half, I had to get my old PC up and running for the event. Buying the hype from Microsoft, I figured I would give my copy of Vista a spin. The installation went smoothly, and I thought my machine would perform wonders at the LAN. Of course, I was terrible wrong. My Twitter followers got an account of the events as they unfolded:
- 4:40p: At a LAN party. Woot!
- 5:39p: Vista has failed me. Currently installing XP so I can play games.
- 5:40p: Fucking XP mountmgr.sys. XP install keeps on failing. Not looking good.
- 5:52p: XP install disc is corrupted. Damn.
- 7:30p: XP installed. Almost ready to play games.
- 7:57p: Game is still crashing in XP. What the heck is going on?
- 8:24p: Found that my graphics card fan is melted to my GPU. That would explain my crashing. Currently running with a box fan next to my computer.
- 11:38p: Box fan is keeping GPU cool. Was actually able to game for a little.
The fan managed to keep my computer cool for a night of gaming.
So, there you have it. Vista was not the problem at all. Somehow prior to last night’s LAN, my graphics card fan melted to my GPU. It’s the weirdest problem I’ve ever heard of, but at least it happened to my secondary machine.
7 Comments
Wow!! Never heard of that before too. But I still blame Vista because it is useless crap. Granted I haven’t used it since it was called Longhorn, but it is bloated and annoying. It is more or less the next Me.
If you want to get weirder, when my computer started crashing, the one person at the LAN jokingly suggested that my GPU fan melted. I kept on telling him all night that my computer was running cool and Vista was the problem. When we opened my case he couldn’t stop laughing. Apparently he had a 9800 Pro and the same thing occurred to him about a year ago.
Thankfully this is an easy problem to fix. I ordered myself a new GPU heat sink fan unit as I would like to keep this machine up and running. I’m planning on installing Linux on it for development during the Summer of Code.
Cool. Which distro you plan on using? I use Ubuntu on my server right now. Edgy Eft I believe. I also have a Sun Box lying around, but I ran out of power outlets and ports in my router. Too lazy to get a switch.
I’ve heard of fans stopped spinning and shit, but not to melt. Did you by any chance take a picture?
I haven’t looked at getting Linux up and running yet, so I’m not sure what distro I’m going to run. I’m planning on working on it after finals next week.
You can’t clearly see anything at the moment due to the metal casing the fan is in. I know it’s melted because even with force I can’t turn the blades. Once I remove the old heatsink, I’ll have a clearer shot at the damage. I’ll post the pictures on my Flickr account and drop a comment here when I take the shots.
Hehe, love the picture!
Let’s hope this won’t happen to my own Radeon.
Jonathan, here’s a picture of the damage. It’s near impossible to get a good picture of it since the melting occurred at the base of the fan.
BTW, I have pictures of my new GPU HSF on my Flickr.
Wow to think my vga card (GF4 TI 4600 since 2004 and its temperature when idle always at 75 celcius, full load at 80 celcius) is still alive beside im still using the original fan and heatsink that came with it … i should be thankful
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