Hardware issue day

I had noticed pre-christmas that EVE would cause my PC to power-off completely sometimes. I hadn't really commented on this as a normal "reboot" cycle seemed to fix, and make the PC work again in EVE again fine...

However, converting video's a plenty this weekend - the computer started to power off as soon as it hit the intensive part of the process - the 2-step conversion to mp4 for iphone/psp's 2nd step seems to hit all 4 of my CPU's cores at max power. As such I decided to pop the lid off for a look.

The computers main fan was embarrassingly clogged with "dust" - I should have realised this was the cause earlier. This was causing a thermal overload... and the machine to power-off to protect its components. To allow me to monitor this better in the future I've installed an ASUS thermal monitor for PC, mainboard + fan rotation speeds. If PC hits over 60 Celsius it should alert me...

I'm now as typing this using the distributed.net client + video conversions to stress all 4 cores - and its been doing this for 30 mins now. The PC doesn't sound like an aircraft now, and is staying a constant 57 Celsius. Fantastic.

But a lesson to me - get the air duster out a few times a year to clean the PC's fan's or it will suffer from unreliability and noisiness...