So in the past 2 months my door has become a natural drop off center for peoples unwanted computer systems. Most of these comps are from my mom's friends who had issues with them, don't know how (or want to pay someone) to fix them, hear I fix comps and just give them to me

I received this dell comp (dimension 4500) about a month ago from my Sisters Boyfriend's Mom. She described to me that it's creating this really loud ticking noise. In the quick 10 sec diagnostic from what she said...It sounded like a failing HD (which makes sense). Well she decided to go out and just buy a new HP comp instead and hands this beast over to me.

I'm sure you guys have heard (or figured out with my post about Fire Daemon) that I'm turning this ragged 2.4 p4 into a nice dedicated server for LANs (when i finally get the chance to throw another one of my own which I haven't done for a good 8 months now cause I'm broke...sorry for the rambling)

I've installed some sweet Server 03 and went to town configuring everything up (Now I offically have Quake 4, CoD2, UT 2004, CS:S (still working at it cause I know nothing about Source Servers) and Fear (which BTW is the easiest and most friendliest GUI server interface I've ever had the pleasure of working with. In fact I wish I could make a trip to Sierra and give a huge hug to the dev team who finally got the right idea when it comes to allowing users to setup there own dedicated server without having to reasearch for 3 bloody days on how to configure the stupid thing to get it to run right)

So it's been about a month now with this irritating noise and I  finally got sick of it and decided to see what was going on. Low and behold, the Video Card of all things locked up (the fan on the heatsink of the video card). If it wasn't a lower end Nvidia card from the dinosaur ages I would of been smelling burnt silicone but luckily for me i didn't. Just something I found very interesting as I never really encountered such an experience like this before (well like 2x ever but still somewhat rare for me.) So I slapped a TnT 2 card in it which I had laying around (cause I loved the TnT2 and they rocked) and poof...works like a charm

Just something I thought I would share with the rest of the group

I am quickly becoming a noiseless computer fan (pun intended).  After my recent video card mishap and the fix for it I am very much loving the knowledge that no fan failure will toast a card for me anymore.  I never did take pics of the heatsink but it will be at the LAN if you want to see it.