Proof of Concept
I have no idea why I feel like I have to further demonstrate my geekiness. But I'm about to.
I have had a number of problems with one of my computers basically since I bought it. It works fine for menial tasks but when I try to play videos or do anything too complicated it would hang or reboot. On Thursday night it did this three times in a row so I shut it down and opened up the case to look at the CPU's heatsink. It had a lot of crud inside the heatsink itself. Thinking it had never been completely adequate I decided I would fix the problem once and for all.
Dezi and I went to CompUSA on Saturday. Not my ideal store, but I can usually find what I'm looking for even if it's not as cheap as I would like. I bought a CPU cooler and some Artic Silver and rushed home to play with my new purchases. After taking forever to install the stupid thing I fired it up and voila! It's been rock solid ever since. The cooler I bought had a switch to kick the fan RPMs from 2800 to 3700 to 5400 RPMs. I enjoyed abusing my computer and seeing what the temperature would go to. It was averaging 60 C before the new parts. Afterwards it got as high as 42 C when I was really abusing it, but usually stayed around 38 C.
Now I may to the same thing to my other computer. I bought the cooler that came from Intel with a P4. That computer has the same symptoms so I'm hoping if I add the cooler I'll be back to having a gaming machine again. Muhaha!
