Heat Sinks and VGA Cables
This week I spent some time helping Zack put together a computer from the parts he ordered online. Putting everything together went pretty smoothly with 2 minor exceptions.
First was the heat sink. If you have never had to install one, feel lucky. All the heat sinks I've worked with required a good deal of force to install correctly, making me worry that I'll break something or snap the motherboard in half. This heat sink was no exception. After assembling all the parts we decided to turn the computer on for the first time. It seemed to work fine until it started to turn off randomly before we could install an OS on it.
I encountered this problem on the first computer I ever built so I recognized immediately. What took me a few days to figure out on my first computer took only a few minutes to fix this time around: the heat sink was not seated correctly and the CPU was overheating. Easy fix, no biggie. The bigger issue came with one of the monitors.
The setup was supposed to run dual monitors off of one video card. One of the monitors worked flawlessly while the other one was having some issues. The second monitor, which was working just fine the day before, was now showing inverted colors and the corners of the screen were flipped around (the mouse would show in the bottom left when moved in the upper right direction, etc...). Also, there was a latent image stored in the video cards memory so it would show windows screen shots during boot up, which was confusing at first.
We tried a dozen things to get the second monitor to work properly, installing and reinstalling video card drivers, re-seating the video card, switching inputs for the monitors. For two days this problem stumped the two of us; we were running out of things to try and had no idea what the problem was.
After two days Zack found the simple error: even though we had checked monitor connections to the computer a million times, some how the connection to the second monitor had become loose. After making sure it was in all the way, the second monitor "miraculously" worked again and all problems were solved.
Oh the joy of troubleshooting computers.
First was the heat sink. If you have never had to install one, feel lucky. All the heat sinks I've worked with required a good deal of force to install correctly, making me worry that I'll break something or snap the motherboard in half. This heat sink was no exception. After assembling all the parts we decided to turn the computer on for the first time. It seemed to work fine until it started to turn off randomly before we could install an OS on it.
I encountered this problem on the first computer I ever built so I recognized immediately. What took me a few days to figure out on my first computer took only a few minutes to fix this time around: the heat sink was not seated correctly and the CPU was overheating. Easy fix, no biggie. The bigger issue came with one of the monitors.
The setup was supposed to run dual monitors off of one video card. One of the monitors worked flawlessly while the other one was having some issues. The second monitor, which was working just fine the day before, was now showing inverted colors and the corners of the screen were flipped around (the mouse would show in the bottom left when moved in the upper right direction, etc...). Also, there was a latent image stored in the video cards memory so it would show windows screen shots during boot up, which was confusing at first.
We tried a dozen things to get the second monitor to work properly, installing and reinstalling video card drivers, re-seating the video card, switching inputs for the monitors. For two days this problem stumped the two of us; we were running out of things to try and had no idea what the problem was.
After two days Zack found the simple error: even though we had checked monitor connections to the computer a million times, some how the connection to the second monitor had become loose. After making sure it was in all the way, the second monitor "miraculously" worked again and all problems were solved.
Oh the joy of troubleshooting computers.
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