Last week I started getting blue screens on my main computer. It would barely run for fifteen minutes before shutting down. I hadn't installed any new hardware or software so I was completely baffled. After several hours of troubleshooting I figured I was over my head. I took it to a local computer store and had to leave it. After two days they hadn't even looked at it and to make things worse, there were no techs coming in for the next two days. Not good. Being the totally impatient person that I am, I went and picked it up.
I decided that it had to be a hardware problem since I hadn't installed any new software recently. The computer is a few years old so a hardware failure was definitely not out of the question. I thought at first it might be the memory going bad but I ran MemTest86 and everything checked out there. Then I turned to the hard drives and ran a couple of diagnostic tools on them. Again, nothing unusual. Must be one of the perephrials right?
So, I unhooked all the perephrials and pulled the side of the cover off. The only things I left connected were the monitor, the mouse and keyboard, and the Internet. My plan was to connect perephrials one at a time and see if I got the blue screen. Before I started connecting things, I decided to grab a flashlight so I could look around inside. That's when I saw it. Underneath the cpu fan, on top of the heat sink, was a layer of dust so thick that I couldn't even see the fins of the heat sink. Ah ha! The cpu was overheating!
I pulled the fan off the heat sink and vacuumed the dust off the top and then put the fan back on. I ran it for a couple of hours with the side off and the perephrials still disconnected and not a single failure. Sweet! I'm back in business!
Today, I woke up to another blue screen. Damn. Well, at least I have some experience with this. I went directly to the cpu fan and it definitely didn't look like it was optimally spinning. So when the local computer store opened I went out and bought a new cpu fan. So far so good. Keep your fingers crossed.