| Yeah, I know some compressed air would work. I don't have a lot of choice, as attempting to remove the fan for cleaning managed to dislodge the heat sink (I had accidentally left the arm out of lock, so it's my own stupid fault). I've been having overheating problems anyway, with my PC locking up in the middle of work apps, so it's not like I'm missing out on anything by having it out of commission, aside from some frustration.
I've run memcheck before to make sure the RAM wasn't freezing, and it never found any flaws (I got some new RAM a few months back, anyway, since I run a lot of memory intensive apps like PS and a VSTi shell with live effects - mostly audio crap that requires immediate response time for MIDI interface), so I assume it's heating issues, although I never got a new power supply the last time I was having lockup problems. I'm looking into some high-output Seasonic power supplies, but that'll probably have to wait until I've gotten the CPU operational again.
I'm hoping the temp threshold on the Athlon did its job properly and the CPU was saved, cause if not it might be weeks before I can afford a new processor, and I haven't even been able to check what kind of CPU I can get to work with my mobo.
Had to order some Arctic Silver thermal paste online, since I don't know any local distributors and they're probably all closed over the weekend here, anyway. I at least could order via aussie air express, since the Arctic Silver site had links to nation-local vendors, so I might get it by tomorrow if I'm lucky. I'm hardly ever lucky, though. |