Last Friday, Goblin, my main computer at home, started flaking out on me. It would boot up for about 2 minutes and then turn itself off and not boot up again for awhile. After 4 or 5 days of working with it (I was sick so it took awhile), I discovered 3 major problems, the biggest of which was trying to hide.

The first problem, and most obvious, was that the grounding in the power strip it was plugged into was broken. Every time I touched the metal on the computer (and the metal on the vga cable when it was unplugged), I would get that fuzzy "I'm an electircal conduit" feeling. Not enough to really hurt, but enough to make it's presence known. When I hooked the computer up to a different strip, it wouldn't happen.

The second problem, and almost as obvious, was that the northbridge fan had gone out. I replaced it, thinking that it was possibly overheating the chipset and shutting down.

Those two steps helped some, but it would still shut down. I booted up to the BIOS to watch the hardware monitor and got to see the CPU temperature rise to almost critical levels. I shut it down again.

The fan was still running fine, so that wasn't it. I noticed a lot of dust buildup on the heatsink though, so I decided to clean it out [1]. I discovered my third problem when I went to put it back in. One of the 4 posts on the plastic retainer clip on the motherboard has broken. The heatsink wasn't making good contact, but just enough to let it run a little. I think the extra voltage going through the heatsink might have hurt it some too, but I couldn't confirm that.

Then it took me two days to get a new retainer clip and put it in (Thanks for the discount, John). It's back up and running fine, but I still need a new power strip before I can put the thing back where it goes (and have my dual monitors again).