Crash!

I was relaxing yesterday evening.  The wife was out shopping somewhere and I fired up an old game called Railroad Tycoon III.  About three quarters of the way through the scenario, my computer shut off.  Since the power strip is down  by my feet, I wondered if I'd kicked something.  Not likely, because it is actually out of the way, but reachable.

I got down and checked all the cords and one was a tiny bit loose.  It was the monitor, which had absolutely nothing to do with computer power.  The monitor was still on. After about 5 minutes, the computer booted back up.  Curious!

After it booted back up, I returned to my game.  I loaded it from auto save and played about 10 minutes and CRASH!  It shut down again.  I pulled the side panel off the box, and felt the power supply.  It was hotter than a habenero patch.  I got a fan, plugged it in and aimed it at the PS and after a second, the computer came back on. I shut it down and headed for the computer store for a new power supply.

Thirty bucks, four screws, a bunch of power connections inside the box and about 15 minutes of work and the old box was back from doorstop status.

I'm gonna replace this old box in a few months.  I built it four and a half years ago.  I've doubled the memory, upgraded the video card, replaced the CD-RW with a DVD-RW and replaced the CRT with a nice flat panel monitor, but the box is essentially the same.  It has an Asus mother board with an AMD XP 2000  CPU. It's old and  ready for replacement.  A box I built back about six ago with  an AMD  Athalon  1.2Ghz is still running strong and in use by one of our kids, though!

I'm not gonna build my next box.  I'll probably buy one already made.  I'll start looking at specs in January and buying in Feb/March time frame.

If anyone has any recommendations, I'm open

VW

Comments

[canuckistani]

CRT, CD-RW, Ghz??? Huh????

[Violence Worker]

CRT is Cathode Ray Tube. It is your monitor that looks like a TV as opposed to the flat panel displays a lot of computers have these days. CR-RW is CD - Read/Write. Your CD drive usually.

GHz is the frequency, it means GigaHerz. Herz is a cycle and named after the fellow that discovered Alternating Current. Your house current runs at 60 Hz or 60 cycles per second. Almost all Aircraft use 400 HZ AC or 400 cycles per second instead 0f 60 cycles. Concert A, the pitch at which most orchestras are tuned, is 440 cycles or Herz.

The clock speed of CPUs is often expressed in Ghz. Consider that the old original 8088 PCs clocked in at about 8 Megaherz, or about 8 million cycles per second. Todays computers are about 500 times faster (give or take) than the original IBM PCs.

Confused?

VW

[canuckistani]

Yup!

[canuckistani]

Hey, by the way, what's going on in Washington state? I heard on the news you guys are getting 3 feet of snow??? Have fun digging out!