:happy sigh:

[burntcopper]

My baby is back. :cuddles computer: Never, ever leave me again. Apparently it was very quick to fix, and it helped that mum was the first customer in there - and someone came in straight after with the exact same problem. Apparently my graphics card fan *never* worked, doesn't help that my computer is almost *gasp* five years old, and I've been commanded to turn my screensaver off as it uses up a serious amount of memory.

Comments

:1101001: techie geek unleashed - run now...

[hackenbacker.livejournal.com]

Yay! Don't buy the story about *never* worked though - if it really hasn't been working for 5 years you would have known about it sooner...

In general, mechanical stuff = bad... it's usually fans, hard drives, etc. that cause problems... providing the power is stable and cooled as necessary, the chips are normally solid for a very long time - that's why old computers still work now - passive cooling, no moving parts.

Unless you need fast 3D graphics, you can get perfectly good passively cooled graphics cards - benefit both in life and sanity (the fans are notoriously loud and whiny). At five years old, it may be worth thinking about either replacing the computer, or if you don't need anything better, just service/replace the more fragile bits (CPU cooling, hard drive, power supply).

As for the screensaver - memory is there to be used. The screensaver may have bugs that affect stability, or the amount of memory it is using may cause other software to be slow - but it's not a problem in itself that it is using a lot of memory. Just depends on what you need.