Please help with what I need to do after getting Alert message after power outage due to hurricane ?

Question

Made it thru hurricane gustav with minor roof damage only. When power was restored (after 3 days) , I turned on computer Dell 4600 dimension (4 yrs old) and got "Alert, previous shutdown due to thermal event". THe cable was off as well (I have the cable modem). I suspect I need to take it a shop to get it fixed. Am I correct? It was loading very slowly prior to the power outage and is doing the same now. I do not know how to troubleshoot nor do I know anything about "how computers work" so "simplified" responses would be appreciated. Thanks a bunch.

Answer 1

I suspect that the Alert message appearing after being shut down from Gustav is somewhat of a coincidence. What's probably happened and been happening is that one or more of the system's fans has been slowing down because it was failing. Being shut off for a few days finally did it in and the fan has completely failed. The most likely fan is the one attached to the heat sink that cools your CPU. Most CPUs have thermal protection such that if they get too hot, they start running at a lower frequency in order to reduce heat. That would account for the slowdown you've been seeing. The second likely suspect is the fan (or fans) that is (are) in the power supply.

What I would do is to pop the cover off the cover off, blow out any dust from around the fans with a can of compressed air, start the computer and observe if all the fans are starting up. If not, shut it down immediately (hold the power switch in for four seconds on most machines) and replace the faulty fan with a like one. You can find these fans at Radio Shack, Best Buy and many places on the Internet. www.coolerguys.com is one of my favorites. If you don't feel comfortable doing that yourself, any decent computer repair shop should be able to do it for you fairly quickly. Especially so if you can tell them which fan it is.