Okay, I told him
Repeat: Processor fans are cranky - they use a kind of brushless motor that can fibrillate (not spin, just shake) when the bearing gets dusty and resistant to turning.
Okay, John said he plans to check the fans out more this weekend, that's only a day or so away.
Edit: John just also told me that to make sure the Processor fan was spinning and not fibrillating, he put his finger in the fan and felt the blade hit his fingernail. He said the blade hit his fingernail and he could tell it was spinning that way. (I knew he did something cause I heard a funny noise and he jerked back, but I hadn't known what he did).
Repeat: The temperature ranges in the BIOS are such that you CAN'T destroy your processor unless you turn off the sensors completely and use a broken fan. There are these nice guys and gals known as "engineers" who figure this stuff out for you. Blowing on the box with a Walmart fan was never part of their design.
He doesn't know if the BIOS will adjust the fan speeds for him, but he's gonna look into that this weekend too. He said he needs to research into what the safe speeds should be or are, or something like that.
You seem not to understand - the processor is going to get hot when it's stressed by an intensive computing job. So what you need to do is make your computer live with its hot processor AFTER taking the precaution that the processor fan is in good shape. Once a fan has begun fibrillating you CAN'T FIX IT by blowing on it. You need to buy a NEW FAN - it's only 10 bucks fer chrissake!
I hear you loud and clear, we just can't do it till the weekend, if we determine it needs replacing. so meanwhile, to be careful and get some of the archiving done, I'm using the Walgreens fan to blow on it and keep it a little cooler and archiving one just one file at a time, then letting it rest again before archiving another, so it's cool again.
Question: Would a fibrillating fan make a scritchy sound like someone scratching something on metal? My computer makes that noise very intermittently and it sounds like, well, best description I can give you, is it sounds like when my car engine fan blades were scraping against some metal thingy that got bent into the blade path. Is that a sound it might make?
What we also want to do is find the speed the fan is set at and SHOULD be running at, and then see if the speed matches what it should be, so we can determine if all the fans are ok, or what ones need replacing.
I'm not trying to be stubborn, Ross, like I said, we can't do anything intense to it like that till he's off work and has time to research stuff like temps required and fan speeds. I've looked for some of the info, but I can't seem to find it all.
And at least I've determined it only does it while archiving, so I know now not to archive for hours on end without breaks.
Brenda
Edit: fixed grammar
and P.S. John also turned off spell checker and grammar checker and stuff on Word to see if that makes it work a little less harder. I don't want these documents altered by spell check or anything anyway.
