Tonight I was supposed to run the conclusion of Honora's CDQ but had a freak accident take place instead. And here are the gory details...
At about 6:50, just as I was finishing setting up. I heard this strange popping noise, then my background music stuttered for a second, then froze, I lost IRC, IE, and all my other background programs. Forcing a shutdown I started feeling and sniffing around the motherboard thinking I had blown a capacitor. Motherboard was cool to the touch, along with the CPU. Now I'm fearing a HD crash so I restart the system, and it picks up both hard drives, but freezes at 'GRUB2 loading stage 2'. Force another reboot, and go into PC health status. Main voltage is good, system temp is reading a balmy 77 degrees, looking up at the CPU temp it's reading 80, I scratch my head and look again...I was reading the Celsius side of the temp. By now it's hitting over 90 degrees celsius and still climbing. Got it shut down again as the CPU just crested 195 degrees fahrenheit. I touch the heat sink and it falls off the CPU.
Apparently, 3 of the 4 tabs on the heat sink holder broke off, seperating the sink from the processor. I scramble to tear apart my system about to throw the hard drive into my spare K6-2, but the old BIOS doesn't like 160 GB hard drives (plus booting windows XP would probably take about half an hour).
After getting kicked out of the Toledo Public Library (PM if you want to know why, it was stupid). I bust over to my mom's house to use her computer (to make this post), but I forgot she's not home and I have no key to her apartment. I then drive almost across town to Best Buy, where the salesperson has no clue as to what I'm talking about. I then remember the small computer store that's not too far from my end of town, unfortunately it closed about 10 minutes after I arrived.
I then come back home, scratching my head some more, and finally come up with the bright idea of zip tying my heatsink into the main board, and reattaching my...ummm..."accessory" fan.
An hour later, it's working again, at least for tonight, so again, I apologize to Honora, Jil, Yard, and especially L, Freldo, and Rhiz whom I said I would correspond with much earlier in the night. Tomorrow it will be fixed for real, even if it means getting a new mainboard/CPU.
