Cascading hardware events
So I'm about to start recording yet another major section of a fourth tech course, which had already been in progress on-and-off since December. (!) For this, I open up the packaging of my brand new (reconditioned) Turtle Beach Ear Force PX3 (to replace my failing Z11), since I'd rather not switch microphones in the middle of a section.
Since it's a wireless headset, I'd already expected to follow the conventional wisdom of charging the battery for a full day for at least the very first charge, (so as to prevent a shortened "battery memory"), but I hadn't realized that there's no AC adapter; it only works on power from USB. This means that I'd need to keep my computer on for a solid day, which is normally not a huge deal, (save for these thunderstorms), except....
Last night, the primary cooling fan in my computer's case started to vibrate a touch. It was still functional, but of course the microphone is very unforgiving, and I'm out of work if I have a noisy fan. (This was actually one of the reasons why I'd purchased a desktop in the first place; less heat issues means less fan issues.) It took me a bit of time to extract the fan, as someone had originally decided to compensate for its long power wires by threading them through an unrelated tight bundle of wires from the motherboard... twice. We searched around for someone who had the right replacement fan on a Saturday morning, and ended up finding Jerry Shock, who was more than happy to help me with his huge box of spare cooling fans. He didn't even want to take any money for the two that I selected, but I pressed a bill into his hand none-the-less. After scrubbing the dirt from the one fan back home, I was happy to see that it ran just as quietly in my machine as it did at his shop.
So, with the fan installed, and done with the constant power-cycling that had been necessary while I was diagnosing and resolving the problem, I now had a reasonable chance that I could keep the machine's power on for a full day, letting me finally start the headset charging process. Hopefully that means that I can actually start recording Sunday or Monday.
Now to return back to the investment firm's ever-changing monthly closing process. I've got a ton of software to write in the next 24 or so hours. {sigh}
Since it's a wireless headset, I'd already expected to follow the conventional wisdom of charging the battery for a full day for at least the very first charge, (so as to prevent a shortened "battery memory"), but I hadn't realized that there's no AC adapter; it only works on power from USB. This means that I'd need to keep my computer on for a solid day, which is normally not a huge deal, (save for these thunderstorms), except....
Last night, the primary cooling fan in my computer's case started to vibrate a touch. It was still functional, but of course the microphone is very unforgiving, and I'm out of work if I have a noisy fan. (This was actually one of the reasons why I'd purchased a desktop in the first place; less heat issues means less fan issues.) It took me a bit of time to extract the fan, as someone had originally decided to compensate for its long power wires by threading them through an unrelated tight bundle of wires from the motherboard... twice. We searched around for someone who had the right replacement fan on a Saturday morning, and ended up finding Jerry Shock, who was more than happy to help me with his huge box of spare cooling fans. He didn't even want to take any money for the two that I selected, but I pressed a bill into his hand none-the-less. After scrubbing the dirt from the one fan back home, I was happy to see that it ran just as quietly in my machine as it did at his shop.
So, with the fan installed, and done with the constant power-cycling that had been necessary while I was diagnosing and resolving the problem, I now had a reasonable chance that I could keep the machine's power on for a full day, letting me finally start the headset charging process. Hopefully that means that I can actually start recording Sunday or Monday.
Now to return back to the investment firm's ever-changing monthly closing process. I've got a ton of software to write in the next 24 or so hours. {sigh}