My Computer Hates Me

I bought a new computer. I didn't really talk about it here because there's not a lot to say. It's fast, it's quiet, it's almost everything I want. I watch DVDs on my computer sometimes, depending on whether I want to use it for anything else while watching and whether I want to get up and go across the room to put the disk into my PS2. I bought that for games years ago, but I only ever end up using it for DVDs. It's an expensive DVD player.

I've had the computer about a week now. The FedEx guy woke me up by coming a day early, so he got to meet my daytime door policy head on. If you wake me up, you get to see me in whatever I went to bed in. Usually that's the bottom layer of whatever I had on the previous day. He didn't stare too badly, but it's always at least as embarrassing for me as it is for whoever is at the door. Anyway, I was covered.

The new machine has a case fan over the CPU, a case fan over the back vent, and smaller fans for the video card and the power supply. My last didn't have a fan over the video card, but I knew that was coming because I saw it on TechTV. When it booted up, all the fans revved up really loud, but then came back down to almost silent for actual running. Perfect. It didn't even get loud when I loaded up some games from the past couple of years.

When I rebooted it after installing a few programs, the fans came on roaring and stayed on. I guessed it was still hot from before so the motherboard freaked out or something. I turned it off for about forty-five minutes. It came back on in quiet mode. That I can deal with. I just have to remember to let it cool for a little bit every time I need to do a reboot. That's not a big hassle.

I woke up today as the sun was going down and hit the power button before I went into the shower. I got out and freaked out for a second when I thought I heard someone in the driveway. Anyway, I think it was just someone going by in an old truck. I got back into the living room and the fans are roaring inside my Dell Inspiron. It's all booted up, but they never spooled back down to near silence.

I turned it off and let it cool. It was off all day, but maybe I just had some bad luck. On the old machine every now and then the hard drive would go crazy on boot up and not stop until I restarted. No big deal, just noisy and weird. This could be the same, except I guess I hoped for the best and I should know better than to do that kind of thing. The fans just kept on going. I cut power to it entirely and let it sit for an hour and a half, thinking maybe the current into the power supply was at fault. Nope. Still loud.

I stuck a DVD in. It's like it was on mute. Great. So I guess I'm out of options. I'm pretty sure the case fan is the noisy one. I could take that out, but then I'll worry every time something goes wrong that I just cooked my dual-core CPU. I looked all over and there's no way for me to directly control if the fans crank down or not. It's not in the BIOS. (I know this stuff because I took a couple of night computer classes at the college two years ago.) There's nothing in software. I guess that means I need to spend some money and get one of those fan speed controller units and plug it in. I can do it. It doesn't look hard. But then if I get one that runs on automatic I have to make sure it's set right and doesn't cook the CPU anyway. Either that or I buy one that runs on manual and I have to watch it all the time myself.

This sucks. I'm showing 3% CPU load right now and the fans are on full-blast. It's running between 1% and 3%. I don't know. If this is a one day thing I'll deal but I just hate fixing something I just bought. It's really bothering me, like I just lost the whole computer or something. I can't even hear my TV with it running like this.