One of the downsides of a big family is having to share everything with a lot of people, of course that’s one of the upsides too! But in this case it meant not being able to watch the Battlestar Galactica premiere last night on the living room TV, in part because I don’t feel like paying for another digital box to watch in the bed room. No worries though, I’d just transfer the TiVo recording to my PC and watch later, or so I thought…
TiVo transfers are notoriously slow, so after waiting an hour, I was all set for some BSG action! I started the video and immediately my CPU fan kicked into high gear emitting the usual jet engine-like whine. I didn’t think much of this as I’d gotten used to it. But about 15 minutes into the show, the video slowed down, even the sound was in slow motion. I was sure that the broadcast had been frakked up and started searching the boards for answers. Finding no mention of broadcast problems, I began to suspect that something on the PC was the problem.
As part of my troubleshooting, I decided to see if I could do something about the fan noise. Upon taking the cover off, I could clearly see at least part of the problem. The heat sink cooling fins were totally clogged with dust. So the fan must have been doing double time to remove the heat since there was virtually no air flow between the fins. I blew out the PC with compressed air and since that time it has run much quieter.
As for the play back speed problem, I turned off Zone Alarm, a real CPU hog, and some other apps. At first this seemed to solve the problem. I started the video again and skipped ahead to where I had stopped. It played normally for about 15 minutes and then the slow down happened again. This time I just closed Windows Media Player and started again, skipping to where I stopped and was able to finish the show. I still need to find the source of this problem, but at the very least I cured the noisy fan and perhaps extended the life of my PC in the process.