It’s been a grueling and annoying last couple of months. But alas, it’s finally over. It all started one fateful night when my computer decided to reboot for no apparent reason. It was an isolated event, or so I thought. A couple nights later it rebooted again, and then again later that same night. Still, I ignored it out of sheer laziness. I thought that maybe if I didn’t think about it, it would just fix itself. And it did!!. But to my utter dismay, it did not. That’s when I decided to kick it into high gear and fix it. I mean come on, I’ve had to troubleshoot more complex problems than this.

fast forward to the present day

I’ve killed my computer. That’s right, dead. How’d I do this you ask? Let me tell you the series of events that led to the final demise of my beloved PC.

Let me first tell you about when it reboots. This is important to know when troubleshooting. Out of the dozens of times it randomly rebooted, only 1 time was while not playing a game. Every other time was in-game. I ran a bunch of benchmark programs and torture tests to try to get it to reboot (processor, video, audio, memory). Nothing. I really tortured this machine too. Nothing I did made the computer reboot. The only constant I had was that it reboots while playing a game. Specifically Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2. And never at the same point in either game. I think you’re all caught up at this point. This is the information I had to work with. And the following outlines my train of thought and the actions I took.

• Video Card - My first thought was that it must be video related. It just made sense. At the time I was using a nVidia Chaintech 6800 GT 256. I rolled back the drivers. I must have tried 6 different versions of the drivers. Rebooted. Then I switched the video card out completely with a nVidia BFG 6800 GT 128 OC (my original card). Rebooted. I was dumbfounded. Back to the drawing board.
• Software Related- I should first tell you that I am obsessed with having a clean system. I methodically run multiple anti-virus programs a week. Not to mention multiple spyware and adware programs, CWShredder, highjackthis, IBprocMan, Tweaknow Regcleaner, diskclean, defrag, etc… I know every process that is running on my computer at any given time. But still, I had to know. So I reformatted and reinstalled my OS. Rebooted.
• Power Supply- It must be the power supply. Granted 420 watts should be more than enough to run what I have. Perhaps it was bad. Power supplies are one of the leading causes of this type of problem. So I went out and bought a new power supply. Rebooted. Son of a…
• Memory- Another leading cause of system failures. I ran memtest86 for 24 hours straight. No errors. But I still had to be sure. So i popped out one stick and fired up BF2. Rebooted. I popped out the other stick and replaced it with the one I originally took out. Fired up BF2 once again and boom, rebooted. Hmm, well at least I was expecting this.

Audio Card- This was my next thought. The games I play are not only graphics intensive but audio intensive as well. And it is the oldest piece of hardware in my computer. I’m using one of the first edition Soundblaster Audigy cards. So I popped it out and used the on-board audio (which I hear is actually very nice). Rebooted.

• Monitor- I know, I know, I’m stretching here. About right now I’m just praying it’s not the motherboard or processor. And I actually read in some random tech forum that this guy switched monitors and it solved his rebooting problem. I can’t imagine a monitor ever rebooting a computer, but at this point I’m desperate. I have a rather old 21″ NEC that is obviously on it’s way out. So I swapped my computers. I put Big Blue on a 19″ Micron. I switched power outlets too just to be safe. It actually didn’t reboot for several days. I was crushed when it actually did. Son of a…
• Network Card- I figured why not, I’ve swapped out everything else. Rebooted.
• IDE Cables- Rebooted

Where on the home stretch here folks. I should have mentioned before that overheating is not a problem. I have 5 case fans, 1 ps fan and a vortex cpu fan which I can control the rpm’s manually. The processor’s temperature is well below the specified limits.

I figured I’m running out of options here. I pulled everything out of the pc and checked for metal on metal or anything that might short out the motherboard and force a reboot. Nothing. I decided to out pull the cpu and cpu fan and investigate. This my friends is where the problem lies. As I was pulling the cpu out, the cpu and heatsink separated. I had to reapply the arctic silver thermal paste. I hate doing this. And I think this led to Big Blue’s ultimate destruction. Ever since I put the cpu/heatsink back into the computer it has decided it doesn’t feel like booting up. AT ALL. Instead in decides to spew out these obnoxious beeping sounds at me. I’m not talking about any post beep or standard error beeps you would get from a fully functional motherboard. No, this was more like the binary equivalent of getting flipped off by a computer. That’s it, this officially marks the day my computer shit the bed. What pisses me off the most is not figuring out what the original problem actually was. At this point I hope it was the motherboard or processor. That way I wouldn’t feel so bad about frying it myself.

Oh well, what to do now. I’ll be without an uber computer for a while. I have other computers to get me through this very traumatic time. It’s just not quite the same though. I don’t think I mentioned that the motherboard was an Asus KV8 Pro with an AMD 64 3200. I’m thinking Abit will be my next motherboard of choice. Maybe I’ll upgrade a little to an AMD 64 3700 while I’m at it. Yeah, that sounds good. See, I’m feeling better already. I’ll keep you posted. Big Blue shall rise again.