It’s never a good time when your sitting at the computer, and the fans are running full tilt… programs seem to be lagging. What in the world could be the issue? So, check the running processes, see if anything seem out of normal… Nope. What is going on? And then… it happens. The whole system is locked up, non-responsive, and sounds like it’s about to take flight.
Having seen this in the past, it hit me what was going on, so I hard reset my computer, something I don’t suggest doing unless it’s an emergency… and this was an emergency. Everything was overheating. I was sure of it.
Upon reboot, I got the BIOS error telling me exactly that. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do at that point. So, digging in, I discovered it was my All-in-One liquid cooling unit. The pump had gone out. Thankfully when I bought all the parts to put this rig together, the CPU came with pretty descent cooler.
Unfortunately, in order to switch out these cooling methods, I had to basically tear the hole computer apart. Not, that I didn’t want to… but I didn’t want to.
Overall, it was a pretty straightforward job that I’ve done 100’s of times in my life… so it didn’t really take too long. Moral of the story… sometimes it’s good to be a pack-rat… like when you need to fix your computer that is overheating at midnight.