The other day I decided to buy a new fan to replace the one on my video card in my desktop computer. About a year ago the fan died causing the chip to overheat and my video would cut-out unless I went to lower resolutions. I could not find anything in local stores where the screw holes matched so I bought the closest thing and hoped the heatsink adheasive would hold it on. It didn't, and it fell off shortly after. I knew it was kind of noisy and since I sold Graeme my old server the office is now very quiet except for the noisy fan in my desktop. I found one made for my make/model of video card and bought it. $20 + tax, and $10 shipping!! ugh.. it arrived today, I opened the computer to find that there are no screw holes on the card. I must have ripped off the original heat sink (which would have had screw holes) to get the new heatsink & fan on last year. Surprisingly the video card has been working all this time with it's heatsink and fan hanging at the bottom of the case (detached). I removed it, and decided to put the new one back in it's packaging. I might try to sell it on ebay to see if I can get anything for it. I'm sure I won't make my money back. I also found out that the noisiest fan inside of the computer is the CPU fan.
This computer is 5 years old! You would never know, at least if you aren't into gaming. 5 years ago this was a top of the line machine. 1.5 GHz, 640MB RAM, SB Live, etc.. Over time I have replaced the hard drive (which died), added a DVD burner, will be replacing the CPU fan.. but other than moving parts this computer is still in great condition. It feels just like a new computer (fast). That's what you get when you don't cheap out on the CPU and size of memory.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
