When it Rains it Pours
This last week, I had to do “emergency repair” on two different computers. The first one is at the office. The fans decided to go belly up, slowly getting louder and louder. My business partner insisted on them being replaced ASAP - not a bad idea. When I cracked the box open I noticed a CPU fan not spinning. The other CPU fan was noisy as well as the fan in the case. Three fans had to be replaced. Great, it’s Sunday. Any of the computer repair type shops would be closed.
I decided to call Staples, since I won’t shop at OfficeMax. The Staples web site has both kinds of fans listed. I called the store and was told that they had case fans, but did not carry the CPU fan that I sought.
I was disappointed, but chose to try the nearest Radio Shack. The kid (gosh I think I’m starting to “show my age”) who answered the phone told me that he didn’t see any CPU fans, but that they had several kinds and sizes of case fans. I decided for the heck of it, to visit the Radio Shack despite the negative news. It’s within spitting distance of the office so I wasn’t going to waste too much time by simply stopping in. Lo and behold, Radio Shack was the savior of the day. They not only had the case fans - multiple sizes and styles, but more than one style of CPU fan! The case fan that I settled on was the Thermal Take smart fan with a sensor that speeds up the fan when the heat goes up. The CPU fans were $9.99 specials. With three new fans the server is running much more quietly.
The other machine to decide to go south on me was this server. Email stopped working, I couldn’t log in, and web sites were unresponsive. I had Scott reboot the machine and it worked for a while. A few days later I had to do it again. And then a day later. I ran a bunch on tests, file system checks, and found nothing out of line… except when the screen would fill with hard drive errors. I had to learn to use the SMART hard drive monitoring to get the answer that yes, somewhere on the drive is a failure that will soon be catastrophic. It’s the same Sunday.
I was over by Staples and decided to look at their hard drive selection. It’s been some time since I needed a drive and I learned that anything smaller than 100g doesn’t seem to readily available. I decided not to buy one of these huge hard drives - hoping that the drive here wouldn’t completely fail.
Monday morning: email wasn’t functioning again. The web site isn’t responding and I can’t log in. There’s a 40g drive on the shelf in the office that I was hoping to avoid using. Fortunately, there is no reason to not use it. With approval of both partners, I take the drive and install it on the server. I had to move data over to the new drive and with the exception of a few files in my personal directory I got them.
Three days later, things are still working. And I setup SMART monitoring. It will email me the next time that a drive starts to go belly up.
And you can once again read my drivel. 
Thermaltake’s work nicely. I used to use some of the orb line that they had for the Pentium 3 processors. One had a fan that broke and when I called them up they sent me a whole new cooling fan with the heat sink as well. I thought it was pretty nice of them to do all of that for something that was a rather inexpensive product in the first place.
Comment by Steve — 4/21/2007 @ 6:16 am
That’s what I like to hear. I didn’t have that much time to research it. It came down to “what can I find on Sunday that will keep the tax office open through the next couple of days?” The answer is that I should have a couple of things on the shelf to swap quickly but I don’t.
Comment by site admin — 4/24/2007 @ 11:40 am