My Computers Thought It Was Octember, Part 1 - The Problems

Originally recorded August 1, 2023.

While tallboyyyy was visiting, I had a number of rapid-fire computer failures. When it rains, it pours. If these problems would have happened while no one was visiting, I could have taken care of them on my own time, but I had to patch things together quick because I was having yet another guest the next week!

First was the digital picture frame machine. Just a few months ago, I had put a new processor fan in it. And in the past, I have had an Octember fail with the montior on it. This time, it was the monitor once again. The power supplies keep going bad for it. Once again, I bought a replacement from ebay, it came, I plugged it in, and it worked. For about 5 minutes. When I power cycled the monitor, the light on the power supply dimmed down to practically nothing, then came back, similar to what the other failing ones do. I contacted the seller and he sent me another. That supply works, unfortunately, the monitor itself has failed this time. It's either bad or burned out CCFL backlight tubes, or a backlight inverter board failure. It's a shame because the monitor is a decent size, I think about 19" or 21", has a proper 4:3 aspect ratio for displaying photographs, and even has a composite and S-Video input, should I have ever wanted to use them. Very rare in this day and age, and a feature you no longer see on monitors. Not to mention, that monitor had a 2-port USB hub built in as well, real handy for flash drives and the like. No more of that either.

In the morning, I go down to the computer in my office and take care of some overnight business with China, and take care of any comments that came in during the overnight, tie up any loose ends from the day before, prepare my video for the following day, and if I have time, watch a couple of quick videos before it's time for me to release my own video, and then leave the computer and go about my day. That morning, I went on the computer, and within 5 minutes, I heard a nice loud POP! The system went totally dead. The power supply has failed. This is nothing new, for whatever reason, this machine eats power supplies alive. I don't know if they were just junky supplies or the machine was trying to overdrive them, or maybe a combination of both, but they were bad. I had a box of supplies that lexmarks567 had sent to me a number of years ago, but I have gone through them all. I had one spare supply that I got off ebay, and that was my emergency one, so I had to use that. I leave the side panel off the machine, so within 5 minutes, I have the supply replaced and the machine powered back on.

This time, when replacing the supply, I had noticed something I hadn't noticed before. This machine was given to me from a customer who no longer wanted it. It was faster than the machine I was using at the time, so naturally I changed out my machine for it. Unfortunately, this unit was made during the height of the capacitor plague issues, so every cap on this motherboard is blown. As a result, or so I thought, the processor fan always races completely out of control, top speed. This time, after replacing the supply, my fingers wrapped around the back, and instead of feeling a vent, I felt fur. It was dust. I always clean the heatsink of dust when replacing the supply, but never thought to check the vent in back. Completely clogged! After clearing that, the fan runs much more quietly, varies in speed depending on CPU load, and the machine even operates a lot faster than it had. The reason for this was actually simple, it was overheating SO BAD that it was throttling back the CPU speed. It simply couldn't get cool.

So I solved that problem that has plagued the machine for the last 5 or 7 years, but of course that creates a new one. The CRT monitor, and old 21" rebadged Sony Trinitron, has a lot of hours on it and the tube is worn, not to mention bad capacitors as well. Once on, it usually stays running without issue, but getting it to turn on and stay running is another issue. It took me about 30 power on-off cycles to get the screen to come back, and it just barely did, with a lot of color skewing, which cleared up in time. Chances are good, next power outage we have, this monitor will never recover, so it stays up and live 24 hours a day. This issue is also solved, for now.

The last failure was the machine out back. Another old Dell, it's been an absolute workhorse and always did the trick. The music was starting to "judder". I had long suspected the machine had a bad hard drive, and indeed, it had finally bit the dust. A simple job to fix, but it is worth it?

Related videos:
Computer Fan Repair--THE EASY WAY!!!
https://youtu.be/iQydt00l0as
VINTAGE Micronta VoxClock 2 From lexmarks567!!!
https://youtu.be/Z-yauGr-T6Y

Видео My Computers Thought It Was Octember, Part 1 - The Problems канала jaykay18