Is my PC dying?

[ewindels]

My four-year-old Pavilion desktop has for about six about six months started making a lot of wheezy noise about 15-20 minutes after I boot it up. This happened a year or two ago, and after much nastiness from and battling with HP, they agreed to honor the in-home service warranty I'd bought, and the guy came and made several replacements, including if I remember correctly the hard drive. Now it's happening again. Occassionally the machine will just shut down of its own accord, and recently, sometimes when I restart and try to enter my password the keyboard won't register, and I have to restart the machine several times before it will.

It just did this again, and when I tried restarting I got a message I'd never seen before, something up the somethingorother rear fan chassy not registering.

Considering the expense of the machine and the torture HP put me through about honoring their warranty, I'm loathe to invest in a new one, and four years seems an appalling short lifespan for a machine this large. Any thoughts?

[mdklassen]

> something up the something or other rear chassis fan not registering.

Look at the back of your computer -- the side where the power-cable is connected.

Near where the power-cable connects to the power-supply, look through the vents, and you should see some fan-blades.

Now you know what fan-blades look like.

So, look at the rest of the back of your computer, to see if there are other similar vent-holes, and some fan-blades visible through the vents.

If you do see those fan-blades, you are seeing the "rear" & "chassis" & "fan".

It is this fan that probably has "died".

Disconnect the AC power.

Remove the side-panel, to expose the "inside" of your computer.

Look at that "chassis-fan". 

Try to spin it, with your finger.

If it is "frozen", or not spinning freely, then its bearings have seized, and the fan must be replaced.

Leave the side-panel off.

Reconnect the AC power.

Turn the computer on, and watch to see if those fan-blades spin, in the first 5 seconds.

Hold-down the ON/OFF button, until the computer turns off.

If the blades did not spin, then the electrical motor that spins the fan-blades has failed.

[mdklassen]

> Occasionally the machine will just shut down of its own accord, and recently, sometimes when I restart and try to enter my password, the keyboard won't register, and I have to restart the machine several times before it will.

Those symptoms indicate a "hardware" problem, probably the motherboard is starting to fail.

Not much you can do, other than to replace the motherboard with an identical one ordered from HP.

This could be expensive!