The Slow Death of a fast computer.

So … my computer is dying. I had a moment last night when I thought all was well … but its not.

Every now and again lately my computer gives me a half a second of blue screen as it reboots without warnig.

Also occasionaly it will fail the memory test on the boot up POST cycle.

Last night at one point it wouldnt boot at all … it wouldnt even POST. (POST is the “Power On Self Test” that all computers do before it even tries to boot up the operating system) From a 2nd computer I sent out a frantic “Arhg my computer died!” message to Kevin Buckstiegel … he couldn’t help me, but such nightmares shouldn’t be endured alone, and he was the only person I knew who was online. Eventually however I figured out that the reason my computer wasn’t POSTing was that my iPod was plugged in. (For whatever reason my computer simply refuses to boot up if an iPod is plugged in.)

With the iPod removed and the computer booting I was feeling pretty good and I decided to go and uninstall every last application I didnt think I was going to use in the near future, and do a disk clean up, in an effort to remove any bad dll or something that may have been causing the other issue of random rebooting.

Once the system was back up I started to do a disk clean up … and the computer shut down … hard … no time for a blue screen it just powered off in the middle of what it was doing.

Shocked I went over to the PC to turn it back on … (with no iPod in sight) it refused to even POST. It was dead dead D-E-A-D dead.

It’s booting again now, but it wont last. I’m now convinced that something … the CPU or the RAM … is overheating.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this. I have to leave to catch a plane today … I’ll be gone all weekend. I don’t have time to start trying to copy off files to save whatever I can before its final death.

Thankfully I have my laptop (which is uber) and my ‘other’ PC. But this is my primary gaming PC … I don’t want it do die.

sigh … I’d been toying with getting a Mac … but that plan is shot to hell if this PC dies … I’d have to replace this PC with a PC … its my gaming system and there are just too many great games that are on the PC and not the Mac.