Today, I girded myself for the troubleshooting I’d need to do to figure out what had possibly killed my PC. Here are the steps I took:
- Unplugged everything.
- Plugged the PC into my old 24″ monitor.
- Attached a wired keyboard and mouse.
- Turned the PC on.
- PC booted up normally, no error messages or anything.
Yes, it acted like nothing had happened. I took it back into the office, reconnected it, and I am currently typing on it. Event Viewer in Windows doesn’t reveal anything particularly revealing to suggest what happened. My best guess is that after I left early in the morning to go birding, something bad happened and since I was out all day, it was unable to resolve itself.
What happened? No idea. Vague theory:
- A program or process pegged the CPU at 100% and kept it there indefinitely. This caused the CPU fan to spin up to jet speed and it kept spinning like that.
- As the PC grew ever-hotter, it began to shut down applications and functions, until basically the PC was on, but nothing was actually running.
- When I got back and shut down the PC, it was too hot to power back up.
- Giving it time to cool off allowed it to reboot normally. Since the rogue app or process would have been killed in the process, it started up as if nothing had gone wrong.
Now, I don’t know if this is really what happened, but it feels right, or at least right-ish.
The question is, do I shut down my PC at night and start it up in the morning, or just keep running it 24/7 as per usual and assume the shutdown/freeze was a one-time thing? Decisions!
But at least for now, it is working, and that deserves a cat:
