Do you smell that smell?

Yesterday evening I turned on my computer and checked my email as usual... after a few minutes I got a whiff of burning electrical components. I cracked the case, and discovered that the fan on my video card had stopped spinning. I quickly powered down the computer and tried pulling the card out, but it was really hot! Dave suggested that I might find a replacement fan at CompUSA, so off we went. The fan they had was 25 bucks which was cheap enough, assuming my card wasn’t totally fried...

I stuck the fan on the card and booted my machine back up. The fan worked, the card worked, I was happy. For about 2 minutes... Then my screen started tweaking out with weird multi-colored lines everywhere! I powered down the computer again, and found that the fan had fallen off the card! Apparently the adhesive couldn’t stand the heat the GPU was outputting... Well, NOW was my card hosed?

After much searching for a way to more permanently attach the fan, I realized that I could pull the pins from the old fan and use them with the new fan. With pins in place, I popped the card back in the slot, and started up the machine... and nothing happened. The computer made a weird beeping sound, and it sounded like it was stuck on boot up... well crap, I killed my card.

Or I forgot to plug the card and fan into the power source... Weird how things don’t work when you don’t plug them in. So, the card is working now. But I had to test it out by playing some WoW, right? It was only for the card’s sake... I’m not addicted!