At the end of 2008, I felt my geek prowess was fading and I rebuilt my desktop computer to reestablish my geek-fu.

Immediately after I purchased the new computer parts and assembed it, everything went along without a hitch for quite some time. Unfortunately, I had a really bad run of harwdare problems which began with my CoolerMaster 550w Extreme power supply making a whurring noise, which when replaced was essentially dead on arrival. After the next replacement arrived, it worked just fine – however it seemed that I had a problem with my Asus GeForce 8800GT video card; the first Asus product I’ve owned that has not performed flawlessly for its entire lifecycle. After getting that sorted out, happy days and I finally had my working desktop computer back which was great.

Over the last two months, I’ve been hearing reports from Claire that she felt my computer was warmer than it should be. Given that I was always feeling it in the evening after work, I never noticed it so dismissed the comment. Approximately a fortnight ago my older brother Andrew made the same comment, to the extent that he even turned my computer off. At that point, clearly something wasn’t right so I investigated further and to my surprise I find that the second replacement CoolerMaster power supply fan has failed. The machine still boots up fine, however after a relatively short amount of time (less than 2 hours) of operation, it crashes and I’m forced to reboot the machine to continue working.

I cannot believe that the power supply has failed again & it’ll be the last time that I buy a CoolerMaster product – that many failures just isn’t normal.