Heat sucks
The other day I had one of the scarier computer related experiences that I’ve had in awhile. After a weekend afternoon of cleaning my office, I left my shuttle pc on and went for a run. When I got back, I was checking my email when I suddenly got a blue screen. I didn’t think a whole lot of it, but when I tried to reboot my computer, it seemed to have issues restarting. At this point, I realized that I should have heard the integrated case and cpu fan come up to high speed on reboot, but I didn’t hear anything at all. Once my computer had stopped burning (okay, it wasn’t burning, but it was really really hot), I tried to figure out what had happened and traced it to a bad fan header on my motherboard. Luckily, the motherboard had an extra fan header, so after picking up a $2 cable at Fry’s I was able to get it up and running again. Crazily enough, it’s now been running for a week without any problems, which is a testiment to the robustness of the Pentium 4. I believe the moral of the story is that you should be saving to buy an Intel Core 2 Duo when they come out because you current computer is going to blow up sometime.