I’ve been frustrated by my main computer the last few days. At random times, for no apparent reason it would turn itself off.
At first this seemed to only happen when I wasn’t using it. Tim thought it might be some power saving feature that had gone wrong. Yesterday, though, it happened while I was actively using it. The power supply was now the chief suspect.
Joshua brought one from the shop and quickly installed it. Success!
The computer ran happily until this afternoon and then resumed its bad behaviour. I thought it must have been overheating. I installed an app that puts up a graph of the CPU temperature.
The temperature steadily increased until it was well over 100 C.
The culprit was a program I was using to rip DVDs. It is very heavy on the CPU, and I discovered that when the temperature reached 128 degrees the system shuts down. When I paused the program, the temperature quickly fell again to about 50 degrees.
Tim is going to get me a “new” motherboard from the computer shops trade-in pile. In the meantime I had better refrain from ripping too many DVDs!
New Life Narrabri 