So I picked up a complete Dell inspiron i3 out of the garbage at school, I'm not a dumpster diver by any means, but I am a electronic junkie. I have a passion to take things apart and put them back together, as a kid I would always take apart my toys and try and make them better then the factory model. As I grew older I started getting into electronics, growing up around my grandfather, who was an electrical engineer, I watched fix electronics my whole life, so I guess you could say this addiction is in my German blood. So any how I brought this Dell home, It didn't have a power cord, but to my luck, having had quite a few computers in my day, I started refiling through my bag of old power cords, and found a match!!
So I plugged it in and get a message saying missing operating system, so I grab a 8gb usb drive download rufus, load up a windows 7 iso and start the windows install, I get to the screen and commence onto formatting the drive and It says "Windows cannot be installed on this disk" message.
Ok, so you would think that its prob the drive that's bad right? So power off the computer, grab a copy of G-parted to check the drives and see if it's recognized, I drop it into gparted into the cd ROM and the ROM doesn't work, humm. I'm starting to see why It was trashed about now, but still not convinced its a complete wash, it has a hard-drive, memory, screen, to my its still worth a few bucks right?
So I continue to on my quest to trouble shoot the components. So I go through my old boxes, find a cd ROM, which is pretty easy as most laptop cd ROMS will work, Throw in the drive and fire up the computer again to see if the computer would boot off the cd ROM, and boom it loads up gparted and the hard-drive seems to be ok. So I delete the current partition, which was running as ext3 which I start thinking that It most likely had Linux installed and something happened to the master boot or grub menu was corrupt, no biggy.
In my mind I'm returning it back to a windows machine and was going to use it as a minting machine for PIVX. So using gparted, I formatted it to NTFS file system and all goes well. So I inserted the USB drive again, go through all the steps this time windows install goes through no problems. I'm starting to get that feeling of anxiety, like when your little the night before xmas. he he.
So long story short, I get windows installed, started loading all the drivers and I get T H E B L U E S C R E E N O F D E A T H!! Go figure right? But It's still not over, now I'm obsessed with wanting to know why this is happening, It could be memory (RAM), could be video card, really possibly could be the hard-drive as well, possibly the motherboard. So now its time to dig deep into this trouble shooting.
First off I ran diagnostic on the CPU, I wanna see how many cores are being effected, how hot its getting etc. After about 5 minutes, the machine heats up to 104C, this time no blue screen, it just shuts down.
Second, I decide to swap out the memory, fire it back up, wait for about 15 mins and once again.... T H E B L U E S C R E E N O F D E A T H is back.. Next is the hard-drive, and about 15 minutes later I have the computer apart and find something really interesting..
A Clogged fan, whoa, and I mean a clogged fan, which in the end, was the culprit.
The computer has been running for almost 48 hours and Zero issues, yay mission complete!!
One persons garbage is another one's treasure.
Thanks for reading!!