Andy Grove's Blog

My PC died a few days ago. It's a fairly new (less than a year old) machine with an Intel Extreme X6800 core duo 2.93GHz processor. For no apparent reason, I started getting the dreaded "blue screen of death" (BSOD) when booting into Vista and I noticed when I rebooted that the CPUs had dropped their speed down to 1.6 GHz. Inspecting the CPU temperature in BIOS showed that the y were running way too hot, exceeding 70 degrees celcius. I checked inside the case and there was quite a bit of dust covering the surface of the heat sink, which must have been blocking the flow of air. I removed the heat sink and cleaned the dust out but that didn't fix it so I've sent the PC back to PC Specialist and hopefully they'll be able to resolve this for me. In the meantime I'm using a relatively low-spec Dell PC running Fedora Core 6. It will actually be interesting to see how I get on using a Linux desktop for a week or so.

Labels: hardware