Computer substitution

Ever since I got my desktop mini-PC in July 2023, it’s had occasional problems with freezing up when left idle too long, or occasionally during shutdown — it would appear to turn off, but the power light would stay on and there was no way to turn it on again without hitting the reset button or unplugging. I found I could prevent it by turning on the screen saver, so that let me manage the problem, and it just became a rare annoyance. (It also meant I couldn’t hibernate overnight but had to shut down. Computer techs keep telling me hibernation is evil, but I looked into it and apparently the increased wear it causes to SSD drives is only like an additional 1% of their life expectancy depending on the drive, so it’s probably not that big a deal.)

In the past month or so, though, the computer’s started spontaneously crashing, giving me a “Blue Screen of Death” and rebooting. At first it was once in a week or two, and I looked up possible fixes and tried a couple of things in hopes it would solve the problem. Luckily, I have a good laptop now as an alternative, a hand-me-down from my sister. For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing all my writing on the laptop so I wouldn’t risk losing anything to a crash. This has the advantage of letting me write in different places around the apartment, get some variety that might stimulate my process, but the drawback is the smaller screen which forces me to look lower down, which isn’t good for my neck (although my sister sent me an unfolding stand that raises it up somewhat).

But the crashes have continued, and for the past few days they’ve come once a day. So I finally took the computer into the shop this morning. It’s a new shop I haven’t tried before (since I wasn’t entirely happy with the service of the nearer shop I’ve been to in the past), technically in walking distance but down a very steep hill that I know from experience is exhausting to climb, so I drove there instead, but made the mistake of relying on my rusty memory of driving on roads I haven’t been on that often in recent years, so I got a little lost and had to drive a fair distance out of my way to get turned back around. (I forgot that a certain intersection had a no-left-turn sign.) I may decide to go on foot and brave the hill when I go back for it.

Anyway, this finally gave me the chance to try out the laptop docking station my sister also sent, and for which I already bought an adaptor for my monitor’s VGA connector, anticipating this. The station has ports for all the stuff that connects to a desktop, and it attaches to the laptop by the power-cable connection point, so it would be a simple matter to detach the laptop if I wanted. It was easy enough to plug everything in, and small enough that there was room on my cooling-fan platform for both the laptop and my new fiber-optic modem (which runs fairly hot). I mentioned in an earlier post that I was glad the cooling fan ran 24/7 as long as it was plugged into the mini-PC, since that kept the modem cooled full-time. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true with the laptop, but I guess the modem’s still safe enough without the fan going, since it’s on top of a wire rack that I set up years ago to ensure my computer and power strips had good air circulation around them. (Indeed, I originally set it up because the old “small form factor” desktop PC I had then — which was much bigger than my current mini-PC — ran even hotter than the modem does.)

So now I’m sitting at my desk using its keyboard and monitor with the laptop, like I did routinely with my previous 2-3 laptops before I got the mini-desktop. They’re both set up nearly the same, so there are only slight differences from my usual experience, and some slight setting changes I had to make for the desktop keyboard and touchpad.

I’m hoping the shop can identify and fix both the mini-PC’s problems. It’s possible they’re linked; the spontaneous reboots it’s doing now are similar to how it behaved in the early days before it just started freezing up. I’ve long suspected the issue might be with the hardware, and I hope that’s not a difficult or costly fix. I certainly hope they don’t have to reinstall the software from scratch or anything. We’ll see. At least the laptop is working well for me. The redundancy of two computers is nice to have, though (for situations like this one), so I hope I can get the mini-PC back with its problems fixed at last. Although my concern is that the increasingly frequent crashes could be a warning sign of a more catastrophic looming failure, since after all it’s a pretty cheap piece of hardware. Well, I’ll find out when they call.

Now I just have to convince my brain to stop worrying that my computer could crash at any moment.