The Blog

I found myself with some free time over the winter holidays and decided it was about time to start playing Portal 2. My home machine about 5 years old, but I have kept it in fairly good shape and have added a few upgrades over the years. I got about an hour into playing when suddenly my computer shut off. No warning. I lost all my progress.

I checked the power and it was still on. I turned the computer back on and it booted up normally. I checked the error logs and nothing indicated what the problem was.

I figured this was a fluke and started playing again. This time I got about 20 minutes in and the machine shut off again.

I opened the case to take a look inside and saw…

There was a ton of dust in my machine, which was causing the CPU to overheat.

I grabbed a can of compressed air, blasted the machine out, restarted and was able to play for the rest of the evening.

The moral of the story: no matter how good a computer is, if it is caked with dust it will overheat and die.