Brain Candy #122 - Yet More Fun With Computers

This column repudiates a previous column, at least to some degree (#85, September, 2004). In it, I sang the praises of hand-building a computer. The computer had a name, Squeezit, but sadly, it is no more. When it ate another disk drive in a record three days, I pulled the plug.

Here's my best take on what happened. Other than a tendency for the CPU to run hot, it worked well for almost two years. Then the first disk drive died; I wrote about it in a previous column (#110, October, 2006). It gave some warning, so I had my data sufficiently backed up and it was no real problem - I replaced the drive. The next disk drive lasted almost a year, dying in similar fashion, again with advance warning. I made the proper backups and again replaced the drive. This time, I was apprehensive. After a few days, drive #3 died in similar fashion. That was it - no more drives for Squeezit. It was time for a new computer.

A few months ago, I wrote about replacing Catherine's old computer (#116, April, 2007). I decided to buy her a mass-market unit, an HP, since I was uncertain about the reliability of computer components at the time. When I built Squeezit almost three years ago, I thought that I would get a superior computer by building my own. The components a homebuilder uses are generally considered to be of much higher quality than those used by the big computer companies. In particular, I took considerable care in purchasing a custom case from a good vendor, Antec, which came with a very well-regarded power supply. Using good power supplies is important; power supply failures are a frequent cause of failures in cheaply made computers. Yet, my best guess at what caused Squeezit to fail was that its power supply went bad. Besides eating hard disks at an alarmingly accelerating rate, I was getting frequent glitches on my monitor and I think that it was generally getting noisier, too.

Squeezit was designed to be my primary computer for about three years, and then it would be retired for some other use - perhaps a file server or a Linux machine. It almost made its primary goal, but I won't be reusing it. While I might be able to replace the power supply and get a good working computer, I probably won't. I just don't trust it any more. This was precisely why I built my own computer - to avoid this kind of thing. Rumors of quality control problems with even premium vendors of power supplies were one of the reasons I decided not to build a computer for Catherine. Even now, such rumors continue and with this continued uncertainty, I decided to replace Squeezit with a mass-market unit.

After much research, I settled on a Gateway GM5478. On paper, it is a very nice machine, featuring one of the first quad-core processors available on a mid-priced machine. Comparable units from the other PC vendors didn't have such an attractive set of features, or such a price. Thus, I brought a new PC home and christened it Hamlet, in keeping with our recent theme of using Shakespeare characters for PC names. Hamlet was an ironic choice, because this new PC was soon to be troubled.

All went well for a few days and then, out of the blue, one of the fans became extremely noisy for about fifteen seconds and then the machine shut down abruptly. There were no more obvious problems for a few weeks after this, but then I noticed that when I came back to the computer after leaving it idle for a few hours, it had rebooted. This pattern continued - everything worked well for a week or two and then an unexplained shutdown. Once, thirty minutes after I put the computer into sleep mode it fired up its fan and then crashed - yes, it crashed while asleep! While these occurrences were uncommon, I put up with them. Then they started to become more frequent.

The culprit appeared to be, yet again, a bad power supply. I contacted Gateway and they suggested all sorts of things I could do to try to fix the problem, none involving the power supply. Most of these fixes assumed that I had installed hardware or software that had caused a problem. I half-heartedly tried a few, but of course, no dice. Power supplies, unless they are super-premium grade, aren't very expensive. I found a nominally good quality unit with a big rebate and dragged Hamlet to the local CompUSA. While I'm sure I could have replaced the power supply myself, it isn't very expensive to have them do it.

The tech at CompUSA plugged it in, turned it on, and it immediately shut down. I believe I heard him say "yup, power supply" and he told me they would call me when the new one was installed. Next day I had it back, and I've had no shutdowns since then.

I'm still wondering whether putting in a heavily discounted power supply was a good idea. If CompUSA sold super-premium power supplies, I might have gone the extra cash for one, but I didn't want to wait for a special order, and the high end units are pretty expensive. One thing I definitely didn't want to do was fight with Gateway to get warranty service. No matter how much haggling I went through with them, I expect the best I would have been able to do would be to get the bad supply replaced with the same model. Um, no thanks.

Anyway, we now have two computers in the house running Microsoft Vista. This might seem odd, but my impression is that two Vista machines play less nicely together on a network than do a Vista machine and an XP machine. Sigh.

One more note concerning that loud fan sound that Hamlet was making. My work computer has started to make loud fan sounds, too. Maybe I am the kiss of death to power supplies.