1. Home
  2. Electronics Repair
  3. When it rains it pours

When it rains it pours

I thought my 12 inch Sony was giving me problems! I know what to do for most of what follows, except the last 9 lines, but I want to tell you my tale of woe. Maybe so you'll feel good that you don't have so much woe. It might be found to be boring, but I'll try to make it interesting.

In just one day, everything has broken.

1) the RF Modulator connecting the DVDR to every tv in the house started distorting the picture beyond recornition. The bottom half of the picture was all white and the top half had 3 wide evenly spaced vertical black bars. I think the sound was bad too. This happened a month ago, and after unplugging the Magnavox RF Mod for 30 seconds everything was good, for a month. This time 4 hours unplugged wasn't enough. So I hit it. Now it's working fine. For the last two hours. I'm going to buy another one and try to resolder all the connections on this one.

(Strangely, I want to buy the same model because I like the setup, even though this one only lasted 2 years. I'm a true conservative. Fortunately, they don't sell this one anymore.)

2) I only have one set top box connected and since the DVDR didn't work, I tried to watch the news with that. I have noticed that the green power light on this DishTV set-top box, ($70 retail or 30 with the 40 dollar coupon) would go on all by itself, and later go off all by itself. Strangely when the light went on without my doing anything, it didn't receive tv! It was like it was off. Usually it would turn off by itself too, but it had been on 3 days this time. The only control is the remote. But when the green light goes on by itself, the remote won't turn it off, or on, and that was true tonight too. When I unplugged it for 10 seconds, the light was still lit when I plugged it in, but it didn't work. Well, a couple hours later the green light was off and but the remote worked and now it works. I have two more boxes I'd better connect.

3) The computer I assembled 5 or 6 years ago has been running hot for

6 months and getting slightly worse. My guess is that the furnace output part of two winters ago and part of this winter was dirty and it has made the heatsink fins dirty. But it was okay in the winter when I keep the house at 68. Today it was over 85 out and maybe 74 in the house, and now I can only run the newsreader or the cpu really gets hot (159F and then I have to put it in Standby until it cools off). I plan to maybe replace the cpu fan with a bigger fan, to clean the heatsink fins with denatured alcohol on cotton, add a second fan to the case, and put the sides on the case to get the proper airflow. I haven't had them on for 5 years, but heat wasn't a problem until 6 months ago.

Oh, yeah. I have anonther 500Meg memory stick that isn't plugged in yet, because in win98 I couldn't get it to run with 1.5gigs, even though I added the two lines in system.ini that everyone said to add. I don't really use win98 anymore. Do you think that 500 megs more memory will make it run hotter? It's only the CPU that gets too hot. The mother board never varies. Running the web browser definitely makes the CPU run hotter and having more tabs open makes it run hotter too, even though I thought open tabs resided in the RAM, not the cpu if thhey weren't showing and weren't doing anything.

What a day!

Reply to
mm
Loading thread data ...

This a variation of the Japanese "Just In Time" inventory process called "All At Once"

Dust is NOT your friend. And regardless of the amount of memory, the more things the PC is trying to do at once, the more flailing around the CPU has to do to keep track of everything.

Soft paint brush and some compressed air will make it much happier.

Jeff

--
?Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.?
Frank Leahy, Head coach, Notre Dame 1941-1954

http://www.stay-connect.com
Reply to
Jeffrey D Angus

A few months back I cleaned the fan on the processor, and the heat sink on the graphics card. There was a noticeable drop in their temperature. (Neither had been cleaned in nine years.)

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

n

My son had to clean my wife's laptop computer fan when it started getting noisy. She is not a neat/clean-nick, but keeps her computer area clean, and it still partially clogged the fan fins after about 3 years. Now it runs nice and cool and quiet.

Reply to
hrhofmann

Well, I did clean the fan about 4 months ago when I had it on the work bench to replace the video card with a faster one.

But I didn't take the fan off or attempt to clean the heat sink fins. And I think that's probably the biggest cause.

Yesterday, the high temp outside was 60 degrees, instead of 89 when I first posted, and since I no longer had the heat on, it must have been

60 to 64 inside, and the computer didn't get above 136 degrees, even with lots of stuff running. Unlike the 148 to 154 it had been for months, and the 159 it got to often on that hot day. I know that is the way heat works, but it's interesting to watch.

Also, the RF Mod worked two hours after I hit it but broke again at 3 hours. Hitting it didn't work so I left it unplugged all night and all day, and it's been working since 6 PM last night, turning on and off when the dvdr goes on and off. (One of the bad symptoms was that the red light on the RF Mod didnt' go off even when the DVDR providing the signal was turned off.) But I ordered another one which should arrive between Tuesday and Friday. 15 dollars. It only has one set of inputs instead of a choice of 4 like this one, but I'll probably never really need the other 3. (One extra was useful a little, but I can do without.)

Thanks all.

Reply to
mm

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.