Dust can stop your computer from running....

Just a healthy reminder.. if your computer stops working.. it may be about the dust inside your computer. I came back after a long weekend to have my computer not start. After removing the harddrives one by one.. then the video card.. and still nothing (no bios boot screen!).. i was ready to buy a new motherboard.

The last time I got one, i did little research, this time i thought, I will do much more. But I was tired, so I slept. I didn't want to spend my money on a new board, I was thinking how I could save all my parts by getting a similiar board, get it tested, test the processor.. all that kinda thing.

but then I found a small paint brush.

why i hadn't used one before is beyond me

took the motherboard out... and went to work. It wasn't horrible.. but there were a couple of piles of dust significant enough to hide many things. I'd used compress air recently, but a brush i figured would do a better job.

So I brushed away, and eventually revealed a board that looked as clean as the day i bought it. I cleaned everything. power supply, fans, and the video card. After putting it all back together.. miracle of miracles.. it booted..

ahh, the clean, but messy cables.. the joys of a homebuilt machine without prefab cables that fit nice.

but somehow it had corrupted my system disk. thankfully my home folder was on another disk and i had a recent backup of the system.

after a bit of work, because i use btrfs, which is awesome but new to me, i made a few mistakes.. and lastly forget that I had made a separate subvolume for my tmp folder... after recreating that.. my computer booted...

and another strange error i was having also disappeared.. for years now my computer has refused to turn itself off after a shutdown. since I had it all hooked to a power strip, i would flip the switch when my computer said it was 'powering off'.. now it shutdown on its own. nice. very, very nice.

during this journey I prayed many times that it would be working well.

so Thank you God for assisting, allowing me, allowing myself, to see this working again.