> I also opened up the machine this past weekend and cleaned out some
> dust, in addition to removing and reinserting the memory, which had
> become slightly loose at one end. I also fixed the plastic
> air-directing device over the CPU, which was a little loose and
> causing some annoying noises.
I'm always surprised (well, not really) at how incredibly dusty some
people's machines can get.
Maybe I'm just obsessive/compulsive, but I regularly clean all my
systems at least every 2 months or so. :) Shut it down, take the can of
compressed air and give it a good dusting.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if a layer of dust sitting on your CPU or
memory were causing overheating problems in some way or another.
In humid areas, the dust will tend to absorb moisture and make a sticky
residue which I'm sure could even cause shorting.
Matter of fact, I had an old monitor I used to tote around with me...
when I moved from Denver to Raleigh, I noticed the monitor would, every
now and then, just short itself out in a brilliant display. Then it'd
start working again. Finally I opened it up and saw that it had been
arcing across some traces on the board where the humid air obviously was
just too good a conductor to pass up.
Why this monitor maker (some generic Korean company or another) chose to
put higher voltage traces so near to lower potential traces, I have no
idea. But more interesting was that in the dry Colorado air, I never
had a problem. Only the muggy atmosphere of North Carolina set it off.
Once I moved back to Colorado, it worked great again.
My little bro and I could tell stories from when we both worked at a
computer store. In one case, guy having problems brought his machine in
and there were actually spiders living inside the thing. Dunno if he
used this thing in a barn or what, but that was interesting. Usually
the bugs we saw were already dead, but not always.
Sort of gives new life to the term "debugging".
SUMOUT errors could also be the result of improperly seated CPU or
memory, so I'm glad you reseated all that... may have made more of a
difference than merely cleaning it out.
During my USWEST escapade (just "celebrated" the 3 year anniversary of
being caught, by the way), I was keeping track of which machines were
having problems. I think I saw about 4 or 5 machines of the 3500 or so.
I was going to send that list to the techs in those areas to have them
reseat things to see if that was the problem, but of course I never had
the chance. Somewhere, US WEST (now Qwest) and the FBI have a list of
machines with flaky hardware... hopefully they checked them out and
fixed them. :)
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