It really is.
This is a story about serendipity, a prepared mind, and a pork roast with sauerkraut.
My parents' main computer has been randomly resetting, with and without a blue screen of death, for some time now and they've gotten very frustrated with it. They consulted me on what could be the cause of the problem and tried to implement all of my suggestions to no avail. Over Christmas, I was able to observe the behavior for myself and was able to catch a glimpse of the blue screen and what the problem was. I looked up the problem and tried to fix it, also to no avail.
The computer continued to give my parents regular trouble and I promised them a weekend of tech support in exchange for some home cookin'. My mom said there would be a pork roast with sauerkraut, potatoes, green beans, and homemade applesauce. Who was I to say no to that? So, up to my parents' I went, having already told them to set out all of the original install disks so that the computer could be backed up onto an external drive and installed from scratch, hoping to overwrite any, or many, software glitches that might be causing the problem.
While finishing the search for the Windows disk, I was taking note of which software I would need to reinstall and listening to the hum of the computer's fans. One of them sounded like it was struggling. Thinking there was a loose connection from the computer getting jostled while we've spent the past several months diagnosing it, I popped the cover open. The first thing I saw was the dust that had accumulated on the main heat sink. The system was shut off and a highly accurate temperature (i.e. I touched it with my finger) was taken and it was determined that the CPU was running too hot. The heat sink was pulled out and the fan was popped off. The lefthand view is what I was confronted with. All of the air passages were so clogged with dust that the fan was essentially useless and the CPU was being cooled passively, plus the heat now being given off by the choked fan. I took it outside and blew the kilo of dust out of it and reinstalled it onto the CPU (I'll change the thermal compound next time I visit). HWMonitor and Prime95 were downloaded and the system was stressed. The temperature stabilized at 87 C when under full load and fell back to 40 C under light load. Max operating temperature of this CPU is 71 C so we won't be going to 87 C for very long but the heat sink fan was now able to respond to the change in heat flow, which it was previously desperately unable to do.
What did I learn? Having an open mind and considering all of the observations led to the real source of the problem I was trying to solve. I went in intending to reinstall all of the software and copy important files back onto the hard drive and ended up simply blowing the dust off of a clogged heat sink.
Details, people! Pay attention to the details! Discovery does not often happen after uttering the phrase, "Eureka, I've found it!" but rather after uttering the phrase, "Gee, that's odd..."
Good night.