{"id":392,"date":"2013-03-14T08:24:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T14:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=392"},"modified":"2013-03-14T08:24:42","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T14:24:42","slug":"pc-repair-and-sunk-cost-fallacies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=392","title":{"rendered":"PC Repair and Sunk Cost Fallacies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have a <a title=\"Gateway Profile 5.5\" href=\"http:\/\/support.gateway.com\/s\/Profile\/Profile55\/WMD3501887\/WMD3501887nv.shtml\">Gateway Profile 5.5<\/a> that we bought used at a <a title=\"Hamfest\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hamfest\">Hamfest<\/a>.\u00a0 While not the latest or greatest, it was at least a solid workhorse of a machine, until it suddenly switched itself off.\u00a0 When it came back on, the screen presented only this:<\/p>\n<table border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"5\" cellpadding=\"1\" align=\"left\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td align=\"left\">\n<pre>This system's cooling fan is not operating properly. Please check fan operation. \r\nYour system has been halted.<\/pre>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>It probably wasn&#8217;t worth a lot of money to fix, so I made the natural assumption that one of the fans had either failed or was clogged with dust.\u00a0 I thoroughly cleaned the interior, checked the fan bearings, cleaned the heatsinks and replaced the heat sink compound.\u00a0 It worked for about a day before I got the same message, from which it absolutely refused to recover.<\/p>\n<p>One of the fans was a relatively expensive squirrel cage fan, but fine, if it took new fans to make all this worthwhile, then I&#8217;d buy brand new fans.\u00a0 The PC booted all the way, but wouldn&#8217;t run a full burn in test without shutting itself down.<\/p>\n<p>The other possibility was that the sensors on the motherboard were defective.\u00a0 Motherboards for the system were available, but at a premium relative to their capabilities due to their proprietary nature.\u00a0 Fine.<\/p>\n<p>As of this moment, to fix this problem, I have gone through:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>4 motherboards (2 refused to boot, 2 with the same fan message)<\/li>\n<li>2 sets of fans<\/li>\n<li>2 power supplies<\/li>\n<li>An I\/O board<\/li>\n<li>A hard drive<\/li>\n<li>A CPU<\/li>\n<li>Two sets of RAM<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a very literal way, there is nothing left of the original PC except the LCD screen and a plastic shell, leading me with several possibilities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is a common problem due to a failure of a component on the motherboard<\/li>\n<li>Through some relationship bordering on magical, the problem is caused by the LCD (or even more unlikely, by the case itself, somehow.)<\/li>\n<li>I am exceedingly unlucky, and have experienced the same type of failure on multiple components within the same short period of time (or I manage to keep buying defective parts.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The worst part is, even though I&#8217;m well aware of the sunk cost fallacy and that any further attempt to repair this PC is likely to result in nothing more than a time consuming way to dispose of money, the pile of parts which <em>should<\/em> be a functional PC instill an overwhelming desire in me to fix this PC, and once and for all find out what&#8217;s really wrong with it.<\/p>\n<p>Probably ghosts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have a Gateway Profile 5.5 that we bought used at a Hamfest.\u00a0 While not the latest or greatest, it was at least a solid workhorse of a machine, until it suddenly switched itself off.\u00a0 When it came back on, the screen presented only this: This system&#8217;s cooling fan is \u2026 <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=392\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}