My weird desktop and his attitude.
And that was a couple of hours spent performing the annual spring cleaning of the house, particularly the bedroom. I had finally turned off the computer for the first time this year just to do partial dust removal and all which I managed to remove quite alot of them. Now I can finally see through the transparent fin-shaped plastic-covered holes into the CPU itself, revealing a clear bluish-glow heatsink fan tower instead of a blurry bluish hue. It’d been very dusty for a while now, so I guess I could do something about the fans too, in hope of improving air ventilations in the CPU tower itself.
But it wasn’t that simple. Not at all.
My sister had to pluck out some wires linking the components together for easy cleaning, so we had to shut down the computer (and that was when I decided to actually do some dust removal from the CPU tower). And that was where the nightmare started.
Firstly, some introduction about this desktop, it has a history of breaking apart whenever I turned it off. And these problems were usually fixed by using means of knocking and banging the failed components against the tables or some hard objects. Previously I had an incident when the CPU couldn’t detect the main hard drive and refuse to boot up, and a couple of banging against the CPU where the hard disks were fixed the problem - subsequent boot-ups had the hard disks detected.
And one more incident that I could remember was that one fine day, the computer decided not to boot up after I shut it down the night before. Whenever I ran it, it gave off the beeps similar to RAM errors. The high-pitch, low-pitch beeps. After several tries and checking the RAM, I thought it was a goner. So I gave up and went to nap. But when I woke in the night, I tried turning it on again and it worked as though it was afraid I would give up all hopes on it. Man, I am not kidding.
So anyway, the real deal came after we thought the CPU had successfully loaded Windows and all were fine. I tried playing a song, and great, only one of the speakers was working. That had convinced me that whenever I turn off the computer, something must go wrong, never mind if it were the wires or the CPU itself. So anyway, I messed around with the wires and fixed the problem after some hair-pulling moments. And when you thought the whole thing was over, another issue occured. I couldn’t adjust the volume with the hardware buttons. And I only realised that after 3 hours when I tried to lower the volume of a rock song. And this happened only a moment ago, but was then fixed with more messing of wires and more hairs pulled. But it was fixed anyway.
But afterall, I did not regret pulling those wires out, turning off the PC to clean the dust and having to fix those irritating problems because what I am seeing now of this computer desk leaves me great satisfaction. I mean, wow, it is now so much less dustier and more tidy. Things on the table are no longer described as “that mess”, but could be named accordingly. I used to tell my sister to look for things “in that mess on the table” but I am able to tell her, “it’s beside the printer, or the speaker” now! Yes, you got it, I’m so proud of myself though I wasn’t the only one cleaning it up.
And yup, I am now thoroughly convinced that my desktop doesn’t like to be shut down and be neglected. That thing has an attitude!
(And I should better get ready to go to bed, I’d heard news of relative visits at around 1100HR, which is like 7 hours later. And that means I have 7 hours of bed time left. And that’s no good. Oh and Happy Chinese New Year.)