Oh God what a week!
After repeatedly calling up my assembler I finally found out that they had messed up with the bill or something so now they had to send my hard disk to Delhi :O. When I last checked my poor hard disk was packaged and lying on the table in the assembler’s office, ready to be sent to Delhi or some shit like that. The guy assured me I’ll get it in about 8 days. Amazing. Twenty days to claim warranty.
Four days ago I got completely pissed off. I wanted the computer back in working order. So I decided to buy a new hard disk. Went to Supreme Computers in Richie Street along with Ragha in the 40 degree celcius temperatures and bought a Seagate 160 GB 7200 rpm SATA disk.
The problem was, when connected the disk the next day, there was a small pop as soon as I powered on the system. I immediately turned it off and sure enough, the smell of fried electronics slowly rose from the motherboard. Fearing the worst, I removed the hard disk and stuck my head halfway into the cabinet, spelling the components. Thankfully only the hard disk seemed burnt. I removed all the power cables and thought for a while. Burn damage isn’t covered by warranty. But I had bought the disk only the previous day so there was a good chance I could get it replaced stating manufacturing errors. Hard disks don’t just burn up at random, especially in a system that works perfectly otherwise.
I placed the hard disk near my high RPM table fan and pointed the fan down at it and left it for a few hours. Sure enough, the hard disk smelt much less burnt. In fact you wouldn’t even think it was burnt up if you didn’t take a deep breath with your nose almost pressed against the disk. Now what do you think of that?
So I took it back the next day and told them that the disk didn’t work. The guy smelt it and gave it to another guy sitting near a computer. I think the first guy didn’t realise that the hard disk had burnt out. The second guy connected the hard disk and the computer didn’t even boot. That burnt smell became more noticeable and if wafted across the room. The second guy then berated the first guy for not detecting that the hard disk was burnt from the smell. (I rule!) They gave it to the guy in the counter and he said something about them not offering warranty for burn damage. I told them I had bought it only the previous day and was about to tell them that I bought the disk from them only because I trusted their shop to give me quality products and so on but the guy just asked me to wait for a while.
After about ten minutes the guy placed a hard disk on the counter. I asked him what was going to happen and what he was going to do. He stated that he had already replaced the disk for me and gave me another bill with the serial number of the new hard disk and the new disk was the one I was looking at. Nice!
I came back home (it was insanely hot that day… about 41 degrees) after taking a pit stop at my grandparents’ place in Santhome. I was slightly hungry and since they always overfeed me there I came unable to attempt lunch. Anyway, got back and decided that I’d better get a new power supply since that might have been the reason for the hard disk burn up. I bought a new Intel 400W SMPS and gave it to my assembler to fix since I was really afraid of burning out other components by that time. I was lost my confidence handling hardware by that time. If I had excess money to blow I wouldn’t care and just get everything done myself but since that is not the case I had to be really careful. I was hoping that the assembler would take responsibility in case something else burnt out.
The assembler dude promised to have it done by the next day but didn’t so I took the CPU back to Ragha’s house since I was tired of waiting and also because Ragha knew more than the assembler anyway.
Ragha took apart the whole computer as usual and cleaned every single component. He always does that and is quite good at it. He refitted the heatsink and the other components and it worked just fine. We added the 3D card and the RAM and the new SATA hard disk and everything worked perfectly. I also found his old Creative Soundblaster Live! lying unused and plugged that into my CPU too. Score!
So finally bought the CPU back to my house from his at 11.00 PM and then the next day (today) I booted it up. Everything seemed to work fine but the sensors on the motherboard claimed that the processor temperature was 127 degrees celcius!
Now my processor is a Pentium 4 Prescott 2.4 Ghz and no processor in that class runs over 70 degrees. I asked George (who is back, by the way - go bug him!) and Xavier to check the operating temperatures of my processor on the net. George reported that the processor would shut down anyway past 80 degrees to avoid burning itself up. We diagosed that the temperature was probably being reported incorrectly since the processor was not running slow (Ubuntu live disk ran at the same speed as before) which would be the case if it was getting too hot due to the Pentium 4’s inbuilt throttling mechanism. And the heatsink was placed properly too. I’ve seen the heatsink placed worse and my processor still ran fine.
Here’s a picture of my my newly reassembled CPU. The red SATA cable looks odd doesn’t it.
So I went ahead with the Windows XP install from the UE disk and started the long and tiring process of installing software I need and updating XP. As I speak AutoPatcher XP is running in the background trying to make my OS usable. After I restart will try to restore my Firefox settings, addons and other stuff from the strange backups I have. Wish me luck.
May 10th, 2007 |
He is your friend!!
