Death & Reserection

Death

Either you are terrified by it or you are not paying attention. I know this is about you because you are reading this. It's about your computer. Imagine you are creating a document and FLASH! The computer screen goes dark.

You reboot. It runs about 90 seconds and blanks out again. You never get to the point where you need to log on. It always blanks out and you can't get in anymore.

That's what happened to me Thursday at 4:50 p.m. As most of you would, my mind goes straight to "what did I lose". It had been just over a week since my last major backup. I had some minor backup files on a memory stick and a portable hard drive but my mind was stuck on what I might have lost.

Later that night I discovered I could interrupt the boot process, get to a command prompt, and copy a file or two before the machine augered in. After many re-boots I managed to snag all the files that were not current in my backup.

I was lucky (mostly because I had backups because of past times when I lost it all) but my computer was still just as dead.

Resurrection

The next day I started the task of getting to root cause. The technical details should be boring for you so we will jump right to the bottom line. It was the video card that died. Here's why...

There is this fan on the video card that keeps it cool. The fan stopped turning. The board would get hot and shut down. When it shut down the screen would blank out.

In finding it I had to blow on the card the whole time the computer was coming up. Doing that I accomplished two things. First, I got the computer to stay up long enough to backup the rest of my files. Second I got such a head rush that I nearly fell down.

I looked things up and found that I had 24 days left on my warranty. After 2 and a half hours on the phone with a guy from India who didn't want to start with a solution and was confused by big words like "data buss" and "cooling fan" I finally got HP to ship a new card. They would ship the card next day but unfortunately I had to wait 2 weeks for a tech to come put it in.

Why, you might ask, would I need a tech to put it in when I removed it (and the memory and many other components) during my troubleshooting efforts? I would ask that too but they wanted to charge me for the card if I installed it myself. If their guy puts it in they paid for everything (so they get to pay their guy for a house call).

So will I accept two weeks without a computer while I waited for the guy? Perhaps a mere mortal would but for me, it wasn't the right option.

I figured out that all I needed to do was blow on the card for 2 weeks the way I blew on it during my full backup. So that's what I'm doing...

The case is on the desktop with the case open (heat rises) so I can blow on the video card.

...and this is how I blow in it (I didn't like the head rush that almost made me fall down).