A Tale of Upgrades

I've been nursing a lot of computer issues this year. They've all been showing their age. On a day to day basis I generally use four different PCs. There is my gaming/media rig which is the newest and doing okay but even that is two years old now and had a hard drive failure earlier in the year. The machine runs Windows 7. Recently you may remember I had major problems with my servers and upgrades were required. At the time they were the oldest but they are also the most important. Some of the smaller tasks took a while to get to but the configuration of the new server is all complete and running now. One server holds all my development code and serves as my test environment including databases etc. That server runs on Linux, specifically CentOS. The other server is a backup mirror, it spends most of its time downloading backups from various online servers around the world and also local backups too. If there was an emergency and I could grab one thing it would be this PC. The backup server runs on Window Server 2008 R2. That leaves my main work PC which was once a top of the line gaming machine but now that my servers have been upgraded it is now the oldest machine I run. I've known I needed to reinstall Windows on this machine for a while and I've had a new hard drive waiting for it for a long time. However I've been avoiding doing it because its always a daunting task to get everything you need setup again restore various settings and it's never quite the same as it was before. Still during the recent mini heatwave I realized something had to be done. According to the hardware monitor the CPU was idling at a temperature of 90°C with peaks of 110°C. If a peak was extended too long it would simply give up and shutdown. You wouldn't want to be touching that heat sink until it had been off for a while! I had to resort to taking the side of and pointing my room fan at it. So yesterday I finally set down and sorted it out. The heat sink was removed and the dried out thermal paste was replaced. Windows XP was then reinstalled and the process of install programs and updates began. For the most part that is complete now and it almost feels like new again, although it is still now my lowest spec PC. Idle temperatures are back down to 60°C and I can probably get at least another two years out of it now. four working computers at once. It's been a while since I had that situation! Obvious moral of the story, don't put off the little things, just get them sorted!