The $6 experiment

Yesterday I tried to turn on my computer and I got 1 long beep and 2 short beeps, then nothing........ I had power to the machine but a blank screen and no boot up sequence. OK no problem, I will just hit the reboot and all will be well. Nope!!!! Crap (actually I said worse stuff than that). I cracked the case to see if there was an obvious problem. As I looked about I checked all connections to ensure that nothing was loose and then I saw one of my fans not working. I then disconnected it and then turned it on and viola the machine came back to life. Problem solved, right? Maybe not!!!

I do not know how long the fan had not been working but I had noticed the machine was running hotter than normal. I thought that maybe it was due to age and dust. Last month I did a semi deep cleaning by removing the CPU heat sink and cleaning all fans and vents. So today I went to Fry's Electronics and bought a case fan for 6 dollars. Now the fun part begins, the power wires were about an inch too short to connect to the mother board. Of course I was saying "mother #@$*@(*". But I wanted to check and make sure the fan would work so I plugged it in to test it. I then booted up the computer and guess what happened? I will tell you what happened, the machine did 1 long beep and 2 short beeps and then nothing. OK, so now I am really not happy.

I called my brother and had him log on and he determined the beep code for the mother board had to do with video memory or RAM. OK, so I pushed and prodded to ensure everything was seated properly and then rebooted. The machine came online, whew!!!

So I could drive back to Fry's, exchange it and look for another fan or figure another way to do this. Necessity is the mother of invention. I started snipping and spliced the old connector to the new fan, hence the $6 experiment. I made it long enough so then I could attach it to the case and plugged it into the board. Now for the big test, I turned on the machine and............ everything worked!

This Machine is over 5 years old and is showing it's age. I don't know how much longer it will work but as long as I backup my system then even if this one crashes I will be able to recover my files. So lesson learned for everyone, if you do not have a backup hard drive then you are flirting with disaster. They are cheap and easy to set up, back up your stuff at lease once a week, daily is better.

The Machine before surgery

Front cover removed

Side panel removed

The beginning

All spliced up


Fan installed and working properly

This is my backup hard drive. If you don't have one, then get one. This is a Seagate.