Prejudice and Problem Solving

So, for awhile now, the Wife’s computer has been, seemingly, randomly shutting down. She’d use it to check email or other duties, then she’d walk away from it, come back some time later and it would be off. She’d note the behavior to me and all I could do was shrug.

It’s an Windows 7 machine, so guess whom I blamed?

It finally hit a fever pitch last week when she was trying to upload some pictures onto her iPad using iTunes. It varied, but she’d successfully move anywhere from 5 to 20 images, then POOF it shutdown. She walked away from it in disgust.

So I finally sat down to see if I could figure it out, since we finally had a seemingly foolproof method to get it to happen. After investigating several software possibilities, to no avail, I finally started thinking along the lines of it being a hardware failure. Fortunately, Win7 has a memory test that reboots the computer into a dedicated little program that exercises the memory. So I went that route. And the computer once again shutdown.

Which was troubling for a couple of reasons. One, it hadn’t detected any errors prior to the shutdown. Two, having the failure occur when Windows wasn’t running meant that Windows wasn’t the problem.

So I booted into the BIOS to see if there was any potentially useful information to be gleaned from there. By pure happenstance, there was. There’s a screen that reports the CPU temp. The readings indicated the CPU core was hovering in the 90C range.

Insert whistle here.

Fortunately, it’s also possible to setup an alarm that goes off when the temp exceeds a certain trigger point. After enabling the alarm, it became clear that the problem was the CPU overheating and going into thermal shutdown. It actually became kind of comical, listening to the computer “scream” just prior to going silent.

So I ordered a Coolermaster Hyper 412 Plus. I’ve had good luck with Coolermaster in the past, so I saw no reason not to go with them now. It turned out to be a pain to install because I had to take the mobo out to install a support bracket on the underside. But it’s a monster of a heatsink. Luckily, the tower the computer is in is large enough to handle it. All told, it took about an hour for me to install the new heatsink, including the time to take the old setup out and so forth.

Since this afternoon, the CPU hasn’t gotten above 41C and it hasn’t shutdown. So I guess MS and Win7 is off the hook.

For the moment.