troubleshooting savvy strikes again.
Ok, I know this is more updates than I usually do in well over a month, but I needed to share this experience and I like to use this journal to keep track of when stuff happens to my computer (and my car).
So my computer would randomly restart sometimes. I always leave it on, very seldom turn it off overnight. Well I did some regular hard drive maintenance today as I like to do when I'm installing or uninstalling stuff. Restarts, comes back with "can't boot, no disk found." In the past I could solve this problem when it happens rarely by either shutting down and checking and replugging the hard drive cable, or if it looks like the drive is found but still can't boot, run the windows recovery console "fixboot". Well this time it kept restarting after 5 or 10 minutes, no disk found. I took some canned air and sprayed dust bunnies out of the case, plugged it back in, but then it only lasted maybe 10 minutes. It wouldn't immediately be able to reboot Windows but if I just shut down and powered up it would boot, so I started to figure it could be an over heating problem. When I sprayed air around the heat sink / CPU fan I saw major dust coming out. So I unscrewed and took off the fan over the heat sinks and Huge dust bunnies came flying out. Well, hopefully it's clean enough now, so far, so good. I guess this must have been why the computer would sometimes reboot for no reason in the middle of the night.
edit: never mind, still same problem when i run a certain program that downloads a patch. hmm, i guess i'll leave this on all night with nothing running, the system error log says there's a disk error when this happens. i've been pondering getting a new hard drive, but i'm Not looking forward to reinstalling OS... bleah
So my computer would randomly restart sometimes. I always leave it on, very seldom turn it off overnight. Well I did some regular hard drive maintenance today as I like to do when I'm installing or uninstalling stuff. Restarts, comes back with "can't boot, no disk found." In the past I could solve this problem when it happens rarely by either shutting down and checking and replugging the hard drive cable, or if it looks like the drive is found but still can't boot, run the windows recovery console "fixboot". Well this time it kept restarting after 5 or 10 minutes, no disk found. I took some canned air and sprayed dust bunnies out of the case, plugged it back in, but then it only lasted maybe 10 minutes. It wouldn't immediately be able to reboot Windows but if I just shut down and powered up it would boot, so I started to figure it could be an over heating problem. When I sprayed air around the heat sink / CPU fan I saw major dust coming out. So I unscrewed and took off the fan over the heat sinks and Huge dust bunnies came flying out. Well, hopefully it's clean enough now, so far, so good. I guess this must have been why the computer would sometimes reboot for no reason in the middle of the night.
edit: never mind, still same problem when i run a certain program that downloads a patch. hmm, i guess i'll leave this on all night with nothing running, the system error log says there's a disk error when this happens. i've been pondering getting a new hard drive, but i'm Not looking forward to reinstalling OS... bleah