I’ve been running my PC a lot recently, doing some fairly processor-intensive graphics work (see HERE). Yesterday, I didn’t go tot he computer room. Today, I took a bunch of reports and books to it to do some scanning… and couldn’t gt the friggen’ thing to really come on. The fan ran, the lights on the tower came on, a USB drive would light up… but the speakers remained silent and two different monitors claimed to have no input. I tried hard reboots several times with no changes. There was a small, somewhat rapid (2 to 4 hz) clicking coming from inside.
I finally decided that something was trashed and that I’d have to run it to a computer repair place tomorrow. At the very least this would mean a buck of cash down the drain; worse, the possibility that months of scanning of documents would vanish. So I started unplugging everything. I unplugged the power cord before the monitor cord, and noticed that the “I can’t see sh!t” notice on the monitor screen had changed. Shoved the power cord back in and the PC popped right back to life like nothing had happened; the programs that were running and files open two days ago were still right there on the screen. The ticking vanished. Everything seems perfectly fine now.
Right now 170 gigabytes is being copied from the hard drive to a portable. So… what the frigg happened here? Any ideas? Is the PC boned, just getting a short second wind before going kaput? Or is it just one of them nothing to worry about things?