So yesterday was a bit of an adventure. For a while now my laptop has a broken keyboard and I have to use either an external keyboard or the on-screen keyboard. More problematic though is that one of the cooling fans has now seized up and I can't remove the fan to clean it since it also requires removing the heatsink, which requires putting new thermal paste on the CPU and GPU. The laptop sometimes overheats and either goes into an emergency shutdown or blue-screens.
More dramatically, my mining rig EXPLODED! You can bet I jumped out of my skin at the almighty bang, the brilliant white flash, the smell of burning and the circuit breaker tripping. I can't find any burnt components, and it looks like the motherboard and GPUs are undamaged at a cursory glance. I took out the PSU and disassembled it, and while the piles of grey goo is just anti-shock glue, I think, an educated guess tells me that it was the PSU that catastrophically failed. One of the capacitors is off-centre, offering a clue, but nothing stands out as burnt. Admittedly with cryptomining now essentially unprofitable, I did plan to repurpose the GPUs for something closer to my heart, such as mathematical calculations or something AI-related, if I can learn how. I did already use the on-board CPU for finding prime numbers.
Unfortunalely I can't afford to repair either currently. Ironically, despite being more dramatic, repairing the rig is cheaper as a new PSU of the right rating is about £100 and I have enough know-how to assemble the case myself. The laptop though requires specialist parts and maintenance. I just hope I can make it last until I get some funds.
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7 months, 1 week ago
05 Oct 2023 03:27 CEST
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