Repairing Zephyr
In the brightness of a Cyrodiil dawn, Xyrael the Elite Spellsword charged upon the besieged Battlehorn Castle. With his sword Umbra drawn he hurled fireballs in to disrupt the attacking marauders, and… everything went black: my computer Zephyr entirely overheated. Turning it back on I immeadiately went to the system monitor and observed a processor temperature of ~96C which after a second of shock from me caused the computer to turn itself off. Allowing it to cool and turning on again confirmed the situation: something was going seriously wrong with my CPU cooling and I was in danger of literally melting the CPU.
A little explanation is perhaps in order here. CPUs, that is the brains of computers, get incredibly hot for reasons beyond my pathetic knowledge of hardware. Thus they need to be cooled in order to work effectively. When I built my computer I used the standard cooling method of thermal paste transferring heat to a bronze (or some bronze-looking metal) heatsink which was then cooled by a reasonably powerful fan. When I told my hardware friend Phil about what was happening, he told me to clean the CPU with the common household item of ‘rubbing alcohol‘ and redo the thermal paste. So I set about getting hold of this so-called rubbing alcohol. For starters, I can’t buy it as it is 70% alcohol so I got my mother to pop into Wickes on the way home from the gym. Thus, I ordered a large bottle off eBay, spending around £10 in total including delivery. The costs of building your own computer add up…
After cleaning the CPU and heatsink carefully, and after spending a great deal of time trying to find my tiny tube of thermal grease, I fired up the computer again, and unfortunately the same overheating occurred – albeit a little slower than before. I was at a loss. By this point I hadn’t had my normal computer working for roughly a week and that was limiting things that I needed to do. In despair, I tried again but this time kept the tower of my computer on its side in order to ensure that gravity wasn’t perhaps pulling the fan less than a millimeter from where it should be, preventing effective cooling. This time, I was more careful in my securing of the fan’s pins to try and stop it from popping back again. By fastening a slightly dodgy corner down first it seems I managed to keep the fan where it should be and now the computer is working fine again. Hopefully this won’t happen again.
Copper, sean, not bronze.