I hate hardware.

I hate hardware. I was just doing my morning email check this morning, finished listening to an album, and just before I started another I noticed a slightly odd noise coming from the PC. Opened it up, couldn't identify any obvious source of noise, until I noticed...the fan (I have a Shuttle ST62K - it only has one fan) wasn't spinning. Just sitting there. It occurred to me that the system had seemed rather sluggish for a couple of days, so I suspect the fan had not been spinning for about 48 hours, and my CPU had throttled itself down to some absurdly low speed in order not to melt. A big round of applause for modern CPUs, folks. So I took the scientific approach...I blew on it, sacrificed a screwdriver to the Great God Of Hardware, and rebooted. All seemed well until about half way through the boot process, when the fan stopped spinning again. I changed the fan speed setting from 'smart' to 'low'. Rebooted. Got five minutes into using the system, poof, stopped again. So I took the case off again, unscrewed the little assembly that keeps the fan in place behind the rear heatsink, unplugged it from the motherboard, detatched the fan from the assembly, and cleaned all the dust off it. Then cleaned all the dust off the rear heatsink. Removed my sound card so I could plug the fan back in, reassembled everything, booted up...poof, stopped spinning again. Screamed at the walls for a bit. Was briefly tempted to see how long the system would last without any kind of active cooling before something died a horrible heat-induced death, but then sighed, disassembled everything again, and plugged the fan into a different header. Rebooted, and it seems OK so far. So it seems the CPU fan header on the motherboard has developed Cranky Old Person syndrome for no apparent reason. Sigh. Just as well it has two more headers and only the one fan, really. Bloody Lions lost the West Division final, not aided by some terrible umpiring. So we get called for pass interference for brushing a receiver's hand on a ball that's thrown five feet over his head and out of bounds, but they don't get called for barrelling full speed into the receiver's back on a clean pass over the middle? OK...whatever. Good game, but sheesh, CFL umpiring needs a serious kick up the ass.