On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 10:57 -0800, Peter J. Stieber wrote: > I opened the case to confirm the graphics card type (ATI 9250 / 128 MB > DDR TV-out DVI 64-bit). When I did this I noticed the fan attached to > the heat sink was frozen. > > My new guess is the card would overheat when the X server started. > > Does this seam reasonable? That's quite likely. Or, it might work until you did something graphically intensive, then fail. I've certainly come across the latter. I now own a fairly good NVidia graphics card thanks to a failed fan. It belonged to a friend who's computer would die after a while, and he didn't bother to find out why until I goaded him. In a typical Windows user fashion, he just rebooted and re-installed repeatedly, hoping that would magically solve his crashes. Pulling the PC apart, we found a seized fan. Faced with having to spend a silly amount of money for a fan that would fit onto the card, or a similar amount to buy a new and better card, or jury-rigging an extra fan into his case. He bought a new card, and gave me the old one. I just sat an ordinary computer case fan next to the card to cool it, and it runs fine. In fact, this fan cools the whole card, and cools it better than the piddly little fan that came with the card. If you ever notice your computer making rattly noises, or badly vibrating fans, now's the time to open the case and check whether you've got a fan that's getting ready to die, and whether you can replace it. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
