Yesterday we watched "Groundhog Day" - a favorite of ours that is quickly becoming a tradition. Gotta love that movie.

Today at work I arrived to find one machine had given up the ghost and the other one had a non-spinning power supply fan and heat emanating from the power supply... These two machines are the monitors for the fiber network county-wide, so are sorta important. The first one would not even boot - no blinking, no beeping, nothing. PS died? We swapped PS with a similar unit, no dice - lotsa beep codes, different each time, so we then moved the hard drive and custom serial card to another box (the one we took the PS from. Had to reinstall it.). The machine we retired was a 486-33 with 8mb and a 2m video card. We replaced it with a P100 with 64mb and an 8mb PCI video card. Slightly faster, but overkill. It only runs a DOS-based application. :) But it worked fine - booted, came up without a hitch.

The second box had a bad fan - the PS was working fine, but the fan was sticking badly, and would only turn slowly if you prodded it - stopping after a few minutes. Now, the retired box, above, had a 40mm fan in the front as well as the back, so we cannabalized it and replaced the fan in the PS with that one, running the wire outside the PS and connecting it to the power supply that way. (We just cut the wires to the old fan and tucked them safely out of the way inside the PS). It worked like a charm, and now both machines are purring away.

Oh, I forgot to mention - the second box is a 386sx with 4mb ram and a 512k video card. Just so you know. Plenty of power for the application. And if that had been a pentium with no PS fan - we could have had a major problem!