Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Today while I was attempting to play the tutorial of SimCity Societies (I won’t say how I got it, but I acquired it legally, you can be sure of that.) my computer crashed. It hasn’t done that in a while, not genuinely, properly crashed anyway. I rebooted and tried again. Same behaviour. Just as I was cursing SimCity Societies for being poorly coded, windows bluescreened, for literally the first time since I built the PC over 2 years ago.

This is what those of us in the business (of owning a computer) call a “warning sign.”

I cracked open the case (or rather, just removed it, for we power-users never actually secure the covers in place at all) to find myself staring down a severely mangled northbridge fan. You don’t need to know anything more about what that means, except that the northbridge is fairly necessary, and there’s a perfectly good reason it has a fan.

After dissembling the fan and coming to the highly technical diagnosis that Yes, It Is Properly Fucked, I went to the Internet and bought a replacement heatsink which will arrive in about a week. As long as I avoid overheating it with CPU-intensive tasks (like, say, SimCity Societies) I should be able to run the PC fine until the heatsink gets here, after which I’ll have to dismantle pretty much the whole damn thing just to get the fan fittings out and install it. I know it’s not much of a challenge in this weather, but if everyone could think cold thoughts for my beloved computer, it would help me a lot.

I know some of you may have witnessed me doing things like kicking, punching and damaging my hand on the case while applying percussive correction to prevent the horribly loud whine that signifies a slightly loosened northbridge fan, but I assure you this hardware failure was entirely a manufacturing fault that K8Ns are notorious for and most last only 6 months. Mine’s over 2 years old now, and it’s been whirring stupidly pretty much since the day it was installed. Why it quit now, I cannot say, but the truth should not be forgotten: It’s entirely someone else’s fault.