{"id":1475,"date":"2011-12-07T10:44:54","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T16:44:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=1475"},"modified":"2011-12-07T10:44:54","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T16:44:54","slug":"computer-coincidences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=1475","title":{"rendered":"Computer Coincidences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having some weird computer problems over the last couple of weeks.\u00a0 On Thanksgiving morning I went into my office\/ham shack and found my main computer was off and would not boot.\u00a0 It was so dead that I didn&#8217;t even get the POST (Power On Self Test) beeps.<\/p>\n<p>I spent quite a bit of time checking all possible causes and even had the power supply tested at a local computer store.\u00a0 I was left with the conclusion that the motherboard was dead.\u00a0 You may remember a while back we had a serious <a href=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=290\" target=\"_blank\">lightning hit<\/a> which did a lot of damage to electronics around here.\u00a0 After that event I had to replace (among other things)\u00a0 the motherboards in two different computers.<\/p>\n<p>At that time, just in case, I purchased an extra board for possible future use.\u00a0 I was able to replace the board in the dead computer with the spare and all was well again.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t even need to reload or reconfigure any software.\u00a0 That was a definite blessing.<\/p>\n<p>This in itself is nothing surprising but it gets more interesting.\u00a0 After retuning home Monday from a doctor visit I found the PC connected to my radio gear was also dead.\u00a0 It would try to boot and get part way into the process and then shut down.\u00a0 Again I suspected the power supply and opened the case to take it out.\u00a0 I was surprised to see that the CPU heat-sink was just dangling by its wires and no longer attached to the processor chip.\u00a0 Clearly, without the heat-sink the CPU would overheat in a few seconds and its self protection circuitry would shit it down.<\/p>\n<p>Closer inspection showed a plastic tab that held the heat-sink on had broken off.\u00a0 How this happened I can not guess as the PC was just sitting under my radio desk as it had for several years.<a href=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/mobo.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1481 alignleft\" style=\"margin: 4px;\" title=\"mobo\" src=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/mobo-291x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"291\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a> Its mother board was identical to the one that had failed in the other machine and I had not yet disposed of the bad board.\u00a0 I was able to remove the plastic clip from the dead board and replace the broken one.\u00a0 New heat-sink compound and re-seating everything was all it took.\u00a0 Then all was fine again.<\/p>\n<p>This story has several morals:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Spare parts are good to have around.<\/li>\n<li>PCs can fail mechanically as well as electrically.<\/li>\n<li>Even a &#8216;dead&#8217; component can be useful.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been having some weird computer problems over the last couple of weeks.\u00a0 On Thanksgiving morning I went into my office\/ham shack and found my main computer was off and would not boot.\u00a0 It was so dead that I didn&#8217;t even get the POST (Power On Self Test) beeps. I spent quite a bit of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-around-the-house","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}