Computer repair — or not
The repair shop to which I took my mini-PC a couple of weeks ago said to give them 7-10 business days to report back, and this was the 11th business day, so I called for an update, only to find that the repair guy hadn’t been able to make the PC crash and thus couldn’t diagnose the problem. I’d assumed he’d check the reports of past crashes in the reliability history and learn something from them, but he didn’t say anything about it and I didn’t think to ask. He cleaned it and checked the hardware, but couldn’t diagnose anything to repair and thus offered to let me pick it up with no charge. I asked about the periodic freezes, reminding him that it was a separate problem from the crashes (or at least that I didn’t know if it was connected or not), and he suggested waiting another day to try to find out if it would do that, but that seemed pointless to me, so I regretfully resolved to go in and pick it up today.
Once I got there, though, it actually did freeze up while he was shutting it down, and because the laser on his mouse went off when it happened, he figured out that some glitch was shutting down power to all the computer’s ports — he thinks the computer is still on, but none of the peripherals are getting any power and thus it won’t accept any inputs. He figures the fault is either in the Windows installation or in the motherboard, and the only thing he could suggest trying was reinstalling Windows, which was a more drastic solution than I’d hoped, and not guaranteed to work.
So I figured I’d just go back to managing the problem like I’ve been doing for the past year or so — using the screen saver to keep it from sleeping, shutting down completely every night, and just living with the infrequent freezes during shutdown. I’d been hoping not to have to deal with all that anymore, but at least resuming the same status quo doesn’t make things any worse. But with the crashes unexplained, I can’t be sure they won’t recur. I can’t figure out why he couldn’t get it to crash when it had been happening daily before I took it in. He suggested the crashes could be a sign of imminent hard drive failure, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with the drive.
It’s occurred to me that I could just go on using the laptop, which has been working very well as a substitute. (It turns out I was wrong about the cooling-fan platform shutting down when the laptop powers off. It does shut down, but then starts up again moments later, so it keeps my modem cooled overnight.) I still have to set the mini-PC back up to retrieve a couple of files I forgot to back up before taking it in, and I guess I’ll try it out for a while to see if it crashes again. If so, I could just go back to the laptop and keep the mini in reserve as a backup computer if I ever need to take the laptop into the shop or something. Although a computer undergoing unexplained crashes isn’t a great choice for a backup. Still, I’ve gotten by with various laptops set up to my keyboard and monitor for most of the past couple of decades, and in this case the docking station makes it extremely easy to detach the laptop if I need to take it somewhere, since I just have to unplug one connection.
Alternatively, I could buy another desktop PC, a less cheap one this time. The tech guy suggested that if I wanted to replace my mini-PC, I should look into something called an Nvidia Shield. But I looked that up, and it seems to be a streaming media device rather than a PC, so I’m confused.
Naturally, if what I’ve written gives anyone any useful insights into the problem, please let me know in the comments.
