It was mid 2005 when I built my first desktop computer with parts from newegg.com. My computer has served me well over the past 5.5 years and I would be remiss not to reminisce.
I thought for sure that I would overclock and eventually buy a second graphics card to put in SLI, but my computer was good enough to run what I wanted (Civ 4, Call of Duty, Eve Online, and yes, vanilla World of Warcraft) so I didn’t bother.
Soon after I assembled my computer, the chipset fan started making a horrible screeching sound. After installing a replacement fan that ASUS shipped me, my computer wouldn’t POST so I RMA’d the whole motherboard because I thought that I had fried my chipset. ASUS kindly replaced my mobo even though they said that there was nothing wrong with the original one. After the new motherboard failed to POST, I eventually realized that I had forgotten to plug in power to my CD drive after installing the new fan (doh!). I still don’t know why an unpowered device would prevent a motherboard from POSTing but that is one lesson I will never forget.
The failure of my 5 volt rail was more subtle than the screeching fan and took me much longer to diagnose. For over a year my USB mouse would intermittently pretend like it had been unplugged for a few seconds, frequently in the middle of games like Starcraft 2. Sometimes it would plug itself back in, and sometimes I would have to physically unplug it and plug it back in to get Windows to recognize it again.
There were other times when I couldn’t wake my computer from sleep, including one time when I had to unplug my computer to turn it off because all else failed. It turns out that the 5 volt rail is responsible for standby power and USB devices (thank you Google) so all was well after I replaced my power supply.
The sad truth is that even if the parts don’t break, a computer doesn’t last forever. I knew my computer was on its last leg when Starcraft 2 warned me that my computer was below minimum specifications, and so began my quest to build the next dream machine…(to be continued)
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