I’m using an old (2002-2003?) Dell Dimension 2400 as my main work machine in lieu of my laptop. About a month ago, something started making a lot of noise, and through some investigation it seemed to be the PSU.

I bought a new one, a Thermaltake that was highly recommended on Newegg. I installed it and all was blissful silence - everything was nice and quiet.

The old PSU was the stock Dell, I think 250w, while the new one was 430w. Now I’m wondering if the new generated more heat than the old one? The 2400 case is very tight with little room for anything, and I have all the PCI slots (all three of them) filled with a wireless network card, NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card, and Soundblaster Audigy card that I added about two months ago.

I also have two hard drives running in this case. It has 1g of RAM (also maxed out).

Monday the PSU (the new one) started making noise. All of my apps started really slowing down. Yesterday my computer shut down and checking the error log, I had a ‘thermal event’ associated with the CPU fan.

So… I have to get a new fan from Dell (which takes a week to ship). I put the old PSU back in this machine, it’s at least quieter than the new one, which I suspect is fried.

But I don’t know what’s going on. The CPU fan I’m replacing sounds fine, no bearing issues. A local computer guy checked it and said so too, but the only alternatives are (1) fried leads, requiring a new motherboard or (2) a fried processor.

Is the case overheating from the components I’ve installed? Could the extra heat from the bigger PSU caused the CPU fan to die? I just don’t know… I’m so tempted to just cancel the fan order, purchase a case and new motherboard with processors and have done with this machine. But I don’t know… I hate having to wait a week.

I’m now sitting here with the case open and a floor fan blowing air through it. It sounds like a wind tunnel in here; I’m just backing off the work I’ve done this week so I can restore it on my laptop while I wait for the fan that I don’t think is going to solve the problem.

I just wish I knew whether it’s the motherboard or not - that would save me at least the wondering about it until next week.

Yesterday I confirmed with my host (twice) that changing the master account domain name would have no effect whatsoever on my business website, www.parallaxwebdesign.com, and I needed a different domain to oversee my hosting accounts. So I told them go ahead and do it.

Instead of moving parallaxwebdesign.com to its own account and creating an empty master account with the new domain name, they instead just changed my master name to the new domain name and left all of my content there - which was not at all what they said they’d do.

Now it’s going on 14 hours that my site has been nonexistent. I finally got them to just change the name back - that happened this morning while I was at a meeting with a client who found it odd that my own website couldn’t be found. I was not happy.

I just got home from being in Denver all day and lo and behold - my site is STILL not up. I am really getting angry, there’s no reason it should be taking this long. I’ve been so happy with this host, and this is the first thing that’s gone wrong with them but it makes me look stupid and careless when my website is down.

One more hour and I’m going to consider setting up a temporary account on another host. My business site has to be up. And I need my email. Now.

We have a 2-3 year old Dell Dimension XP2400 that I’m bringing into my office to use in lieu of the laptop. It’s in good shape overall, but has a ridiculous little 30gB hard drive.

We had a spare 80gB drive in the basement so that worked out perfectly. But the mounting bracket that came with this cramped case only holds one drive, and it has a weird shape. We went scrounging in the server room at my husband’s office looking for other cages and found two, but neither remotely fit.

I did find a few online, but decided to go with the bracket kit from Issue Resolved. Even though it was a bit more expensive than the bracket alone, they were super-speedy (it got here in three days) and included every part I needed - ribbon, screws etc. I’d use them again.

Now we’re formatting the HD after some confusion about how to do this on Windows XP Pro… Seems to be proceeding normally. I can’t wait to plug in the flat panel monitor.