I've had a couple of computer scares the last couple of days.  Yesterday, I returned home to find my computer rebooting itself, but it seemed stuck in an XP startup progress screen.  I turned it off, waited 10 minutes, as I'm apt to do, then started it back up again.  Unfortunately, it was really noisy on the reboot, and I knew it was time to take a look inside.  I mean, it had been too noisy for awhile, but this was ridiculous.  So, I opened it up, and it was full of dust, so my first attempt was just the basic clean up.  I took it outside with my compressed air duster, and blew out a lot of the dust, especially from areas containing fans, as they were the most likely culprit for the noise-making.  I took it back inside, plugged it back in, and still there was the noise. 

With the cover off, I put my ear near the inside to try to track down the source of the noise.  The power supply!  This was a good thing I thought, because I've replaced power supplies before, and they are failry cheap and easy to replace.  I took the power supply out, and gave it its very own air duster treatment.  I decided I'd take it apart, too, which voided the warranty on it, but like I said, they aren't that expensive.  I wanted to test it now by itself, so I plugged it in and turned on the switch.  Nothing.  This is because, it turns out, it's controlled by the power button on the computer via the motherboard.  So, I decided to plug the power back into the motherboard in order to use said power button.  Doing so also powered the fans on the CPUs, and now with the power supply separated from these fans by more distance, I realized that the noise was coming from one of the CPU fans.  By alternately turning the computer on with each CPU fan plugged in by itself, I discovered which fan was the problem.  I took it off and could tell just by spinning it with my finger that it was not in good working order.  So, I walked down to the neighborhood Radio Shack, bought a $10 fan, and installed it.  Problem solved and a quieter office to boot!

Then, this morning, I came in to my office, and was greeted by a hard disk failure error message.  Yikes.  But I didn't panic, because I know that whenever I get inside my computer and start messing around and moving it around, cables and such are likely to come loose.  Sure enough, I hadn't firmly plugged the power back into that hard drive, so it was just not turning on.  I plugged it back in and now my computer has lived to blog about it.