with all of the dying hard drives and crazy boot problems, i thought this was humorous.

i turned off my machine for the first time in a month the other day, and when i came back and turned it on it ran for about 5 minutes then shut itself down. i turned it back on to whacked-out display settings. it ran for another 5 minutes, then shut off again. i thought this is strange, it is as if the thing is overheating.. my studio was hot, but not THAT hot! so i turn it back on and sit in my Bios, where it is giving me temperature readings and fan RPM's. system is running at 107fh, processor was at 156fh. i have an athlon, and it typically runs hot.. but that was.. REALLY hot.. however my system fan and processor fans were running fine. so i open up the case and inspect my 7 fans, thinking maybe it was the fan on the video card. everything was fine, but boy was the power supply hot. in fact, it was too hot to touch, and the back of the PS case nearly took the skin off my finger. i realized that the PS fan wasn't spinning.

so i kicked it.

the fan spun right up and began pushing out some extremely hot air. within 30 seconds the case was beginning to feel cool, and in a couple minutes was suprisingly the coolest part of the box.

so, i was suprised at how hot the PS gets over normal usage (mind you i'm using all of its 500 watts).. i was even more suprised at how efficient its fan was.. i figure it must have gotten stuck on some dust after i finally shut it off.

the moral of the story: everything works better when you kick it.