I thought on what was wrong with it for awhile. Having removed the side panel of the tower and targeting a fan on the motherboard I had hoped that this would somewhat remedy the problem. No effect. The system continued to shut down and my efforts appeared to be in vain. What else might be the source of my tormented situation, I'd ponder. Perhaps removing the graphics card, lowering performance boosting settings and sticking to text based applications would discontinue this grievance somewhat. Nope, simply reading a .pdf file with no browser windows open or media files playing still resulting in random shut downs. I was getting ready to just quit computing and move on with life and go become an outdoorsman or an auto-mechanic or something.
But I didn't give up. I had a closer look in at the motherboard, starting to wonder if pulling out the RAM might extend my pre-hibernation syndrome hindered machine when I noticed this.
Son of a gun. I had identified the culprit for sure and at last. How I hadn't noticed it before(this pic is with the covering fan removed, four screws). My carelessness and lack of ever using compressed air on this motherboard had obviously led to the heat sinks from the CPU being so covered in dust that it had appeared that I was unintentionally cooking the delicate silicon.
The poor baby. I didn't know.
Although I am grateful of the knowledge I have gained in this whole fiasco and have thus decided to share it with you in in the unfortunate case that someone out there might happen to be dealing with the same problem.
But how to remedy it. A trek to the store proves to be quite a pain in my situation at times. Gathering a can of compressed air could mean an entire days task and I just have not yet developed the patience.
So my quick fix was, vacuum cleaner. I gathered up the hose and the cords from a nearby room and readied my extraction by means of touching some supposed grounded material (faucet handles or door catch areas) as I've heard that static-electricity has a tendency to annihilate these nifty circuit boards to an even greater extent of destruction and nullifying disgrace. I had disconnected that power cord from the tower in an effort to not fry what's left of my brains.
The whole time vacuuming away at this clogged mess I sat praying that I wasn't making my situation worse by disrupting some much needed component. After a few minutes of pulling off as much debris as I could with the multiple attachments my situation had dramatically visually improved.
Not perfect, I know. I didn't want to poke around at it anymore than necessary and wind up paralyzing my equipment with a Q-Tip and who knows what the effect of rubbing alcohol might be on these things. The last thing I need is a retarded drunk computer who refuses to wake up further cluttering up my space with a Q-Tip resting in his head. So I forgo'ed the 99.999% efficiency cleaning job with a safe 99% one, just to be safe. Reattached the fan, mustering as much confidence that I wouldn't slip and stab the fragile motherboard, and re-installed my low-end graphics card. And you know what, it appears to have worked. Watched a Hi-Def movie on it last night (Had to give it a thorough test just to be sure before writing all of this out), ran a couple of Direct X 9 requiring .EXEs and the combination of this blog post and the Chopin playing on Win Amp not causing it to shut down has proven to me that this operation was a success.
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