My primary Windows machine is glitching. This morning, it woke up dead. Or rather, I woke up to find it in a zombie state, with power on but no video signal. I couldn’t even do a hard reboot.

I shut it down for a while, than powered it up, at which point it booted. For a few minutes. Then mouse and keyboard froze, and I had to power down again. After repeats of this, with different applications running, I came to the conclusion that it’s a hardware problem, most likely some component on the motherboard overheating. The fan seems to be running all right, but the CPU seems like the most likely suspect to me. Are there other reasonable possibilities? It’s really bad timing, because I’ve got some data on that machine that I need for some deadlines today.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box.

[Update at 9 AM EDT on a rainy south Florida morning]

I managed to get it up just long enough to drag some files over to the other machine, but I suspect it will be a long slow process in continuing to reboot it until I get everything I need. I really need to set up a nightly cron job to automatically back up to it.

[Follow up at 11:22 AM EDT]

In response to questions in comments, the cabinet is open, the fan is running (though I don’t know it it’s at an adequate speed), and the (Athlon XP) processor is running at its default speed of 1.8 Gigahertz (no reason to overclock this machine–I just use it for office work).

It’s now gotten to the point at which I can’t do anything useful with it–it bluescreens shortly after logging in. It’s been fragile for a while, often locking up or bluescreening randomly, or occasionally right after boot, but whatever the problem was seems to be coming to a head. I’ll try swapping out fan/CPU, because that seems like the most likely source of the problem. I’ve been wanting a faster processor anyway. But probably not today–no time to mess with it