I think my trusty old Acer desktop is finally on its last legs after nearly 15 years of 24/7 use.
Around an hour ago the fans cut out (I never noticed as I was out of the room at the time, and my noisy old electric fan heater was on as it was 10°C inside the house) and not long after I got back the PC automatically powered off when I was looking at eBay with nothing else running. Funny how things always seem to fail in the middle of winter for me! The last time this PC went kaboom it was in the middle of winter back in July 2012, which was actually my first post on here (sorry, I can't find the link to it as the "view all posts" search feature maxes out at 500 posts/20 pages; I have 588 as of this post) when its original 200W FSP power supply failed (courtesy of Teapo, of course). Actually I lie, I had an issue with the CPU fan in October 2017 (which is spring in Australia), replacing it fixed that however.
The first thing I did, given the random loss of power, was rip open the Thermal Master TM-420-PMSR power supply which is from 2010 with known bad name caps (JEE) expecting to see everything bulging and/or fried, only to find nothing wrong in there at all, so I turned the PC back on and found that the only fan spinning was in fact the power supply fan; both the CPU fan and case fan were not moving at all.
After five minutes sitting in the BIOS with no fans spinning the elderly Celeron's 2.8 GHz CPU jumped to 80°C when I gave up and hit the off switch on the PSU.
Of note, this was the same PC I mentioned some time ago about erratic fan speeds. The CPU fan had been running like a sick car when cold, going up and down at low RPM (which was not a fan issue, since giving it a full 12V made it roar like a jet) but I believe this is just a quirk of this PC - not even SpeedFan can take control of the fans in these models as the PC overrides it a second after (e.g. the fans would rev for a second when the speed was changed and then slow back down).
Any pointers to why the fans just stopped, e.g. has a fan controller on the mainboard just taken a crap? IIRC the PSU fan is connected directly to the 12V rail thus it was still running.
I have never had this problem occur once in the 30+ PCs I've had (the worst I've encountered is where a bearing starts failing/drying out/gets dust in it and the fan would buzz/growl and start wobbling, unable to get to proper operating speed, but that's easily fixed by cannibalizing a scrap PC for another fan). The only time I have found a fan not spinning at all has been my own stupid fault e.g. forgetting to plug it back in after reassembling a PC. The computer itself still wants to run, everything is operating normally for it except that the fans are no longer spinning.
Around an hour ago the fans cut out (I never noticed as I was out of the room at the time, and my noisy old electric fan heater was on as it was 10°C inside the house) and not long after I got back the PC automatically powered off when I was looking at eBay with nothing else running. Funny how things always seem to fail in the middle of winter for me! The last time this PC went kaboom it was in the middle of winter back in July 2012, which was actually my first post on here (sorry, I can't find the link to it as the "view all posts" search feature maxes out at 500 posts/20 pages; I have 588 as of this post) when its original 200W FSP power supply failed (courtesy of Teapo, of course). Actually I lie, I had an issue with the CPU fan in October 2017 (which is spring in Australia), replacing it fixed that however.
The first thing I did, given the random loss of power, was rip open the Thermal Master TM-420-PMSR power supply which is from 2010 with known bad name caps (JEE) expecting to see everything bulging and/or fried, only to find nothing wrong in there at all, so I turned the PC back on and found that the only fan spinning was in fact the power supply fan; both the CPU fan and case fan were not moving at all.
After five minutes sitting in the BIOS with no fans spinning the elderly Celeron's 2.8 GHz CPU jumped to 80°C when I gave up and hit the off switch on the PSU.
Of note, this was the same PC I mentioned some time ago about erratic fan speeds. The CPU fan had been running like a sick car when cold, going up and down at low RPM (which was not a fan issue, since giving it a full 12V made it roar like a jet) but I believe this is just a quirk of this PC - not even SpeedFan can take control of the fans in these models as the PC overrides it a second after (e.g. the fans would rev for a second when the speed was changed and then slow back down).
Any pointers to why the fans just stopped, e.g. has a fan controller on the mainboard just taken a crap? IIRC the PSU fan is connected directly to the 12V rail thus it was still running.
I have never had this problem occur once in the 30+ PCs I've had (the worst I've encountered is where a bearing starts failing/drying out/gets dust in it and the fan would buzz/growl and start wobbling, unable to get to proper operating speed, but that's easily fixed by cannibalizing a scrap PC for another fan). The only time I have found a fan not spinning at all has been my own stupid fault e.g. forgetting to plug it back in after reassembling a PC. The computer itself still wants to run, everything is operating normally for it except that the fans are no longer spinning.
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