Tuesday, March 01, 2005

On the verge of solving one of the greatest mysteries of our time

Some of my frineds are familiar with the terrible noise my computer makes at startup. I'm not so good at describing sounds, but during my research into it I saw somebody describe it as "graunchy". I think that's as accurrate as I'm going to find.

Turns out it's not caused by a wire getting stuck in a fan like I had thought, but rather the sleeve bearing in my chipset fan starting to wear out. It causes some vibration, and that creates the terrible noise I'm so familiar with.

If it was just happening on startup, I wouldn't mind so much, but lately it's been happening more often. It's sometimes started doing it in the middle of the day, or late at night, and never without any warning. I'll be sitting here doing something and suddenly have my delicate ears assaulted by the fan noise from hell.

After some research, I've discovered a range of options. Mark suggested lubricating the fan with some oil, which I might do. I can replace the fan, which will be cheap. I can put a little blob of sticky stuff on the fan to throw the balance off, and thus remove the vibration (I'm not sure how well that'll work). And, most heartening of all, I found some testimonials that say that my motherboard doesn't even need a fan on the chipset. I could just remove the fan and everything would be fine.

Right now the fan's being quiet, but if it acts up again I'm probably going to rip it out of there and see if those testimonials are true.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home