I managed to plug an atx powersupply backwards into my favorite gigabyte bx slot1 board. Hot summer day, tired, and it plugged in to easily to be anything but correct (or so I thought) tried for 2 hours to trouble shoot what was wrong after discovering that. Ended up blowing the power supply but leaving my beloved board intact!!! 😁 Now I tend to not rush as much needless to say.

Here's what I went through on Thursday 10-3:

I just came home early from work around 5pm and decided to play a short round of Half-Life on my Core i5 main rig. As I was going through the Surface Tension level, I noticed the case fans were running at full bore. Intrigued, I saved and ended the game to check my hardware monitor. Everything seemed OK until I looked at the CPU temps; they were 25 degrees higher than usual. Alarmed, I checked the CPU fan; it was frozen still 😳 .

I quickly turned the computer off and considered my options. No replacement fan on hand, and no computer store to buy a replacement nearby. Plenty of replacements online, but takes a few days at least to get one. So I did the only thing left - fix the frozen fan and get it working again. After 30 minutes of going at it, I got the fan loose enough to be useful again. It still works as of today (it's just very loud and noisy), but I have already ordered a replacement online; as soon as I get it, the old one is gone.

Lesson learned: don't be complacent and careless. I will now check my hardware monitor and all fans at least twice daily to make sure everything is in working order.

^^^ Does your boards BIOS give you the option of the alarm going off with a Fan failure? It might help just in case it happens again.

Sorry Forevermore, it does not.

The mobo is an MSI Z77A-G43. Neither the manual nor MSI's website list an alarm option due to fan failure. The BIOS updates don't have anything like this listed either. And the hardware monitor software I use in Windows 7 doesn't have any type of fan or CPU alarms either, it just shows current data (temperature, voltage, RPM, etc). The only thing I found is the SMARTFan option which I did activate to quiet that noisy fan a bit.

I'll just stay alert and keep an eye out as much as possible to avoid a repeat scenario.

If you ever feel compelled to clean a mouse, don't use lysol on it, and ESPECIALLY don't try cleaning it while it's plugged in. I once fried one of my favorite mice this way, and to this very day I still regret it. It was a damn good mouse, quite light and sensitive, but I forgot what brand and model it was. 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

If you ever feel compelled to clean a mouse, don't use lysol on it, and ESPECIALLY don't try cleaning it while it's plugged in. I once fried one of my favorite mice this way, and to this very day I still regret it. It was a damn good mouse, quite light and sensitive, but I forgot what brand and model it was. 🤣

That's why I love laser mice 😁

But if Im using a serial mouse, which is usually a ball, then I dry clean it by scraping the muck off the sensor wheels.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

Here's what I went through on Thursday 10-3: […]
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Here's what I went through on Thursday 10-3:

I just came home early from work around 5pm and decided to play a short round of Half-Life on my Core i5 main rig. As I was going through the Surface Tension level, I noticed the case fans were running at full bore. Intrigued, I saved and ended the game to check my hardware monitor. Everything seemed OK until I looked at the CPU temps; they were 25 degrees higher than usual. Alarmed, I checked the CPU fan; it was frozen still 😳 .

I quickly turned the computer off and considered my options. No replacement fan on hand, and no computer store to buy a replacement nearby. Plenty of replacements online, but takes a few days at least to get one. So I did the only thing left - fix the frozen fan and get it working again. After 30 minutes of going at it, I got the fan loose enough to be useful again. It still works as of today (it's just very loud and noisy), but I have already ordered a replacement online; as soon as I get it, the old one is gone.

Lesson learned: don't be complacent and careless. I will now check my hardware monitor and all fans at least twice daily to make sure everything is in working order.

Another emergency temporary option is replacing the failed CPU heatsink fan with one of the case intake fans, when sizes are similar.

For max redundancy on air cooling: Twin tower CPU heatsink with 2+ fans. If one of its fans dies you'll probably not even notice. Even if both fans fail the huge twin tower heatsink has a good chance, provided decent case ventilation, of keeping the CPU alive until the problem is detected and solved.