I did. Exactly thats what I did. Generally I give down time during my vacations but there are times, I leave it that way and go. I never had any troubles. Until this time.
Mine was a custom built – where I chose every one of the smallest components and assembled myself – and that worked!.. Flawlessly, even I was surprised.
Its been close to 2 full years. Windows 8 and 8.1 cornered me once each for a full C drive format over time but not a big deal as I had right backups and cloud storage options.
This time was different.
When I was back from my vacation, system woke up from an Hibernation. Am not a big fan of hibernation as the regular boot itself extremely faster with my SSD drive. I started watching an high resolution movie (generally I download full – non compressed versions for quality).
Halfway, my monitor gone blank while CPU light was still on. I gave it few seconds and tried – still hung. Half heartedly tried soft boot – nope, no response.
Touched reset button, after few seconds, it agreed and restarted and I continued with movie.
In just few more mins same story. Hung. Totally. I thought I need to check if any windows updates are pending. I was fully up to date. This time even reset button gave up on me. No response.
I had to hold Power button for 10 seconds to cut the power completely. When I switched on again, there was not a single response. Nothing on monitor. CPU LED on and thats it!!
This IS scary!.. Tried the same for like 5 times and gave it whole night and even after in the morning same story.
My first guess was my IPS monitor which used DVI – but a crashed or default BIOS will look at default VGA port. I took pains to get my old monitor and connected.
Same story.
Panick. People suggested in forums that the CMOS battery is dead – which I hardly believed because nothing it could do anything like this. Worst case, it will mess with your time data but not from starting the machine itself. Machine was not at all booting.
More panicking. default VGA, multiple restarts, removing all USBs and nothing helped.
Finally somewhere I read, it could be related to the faulty RAM. My 8+4+4 GB rams were relatively new and all of same frequency (thats important too). Still half heartedly removed all RAM and left just one and started my machine.
Boom, as if nothing happened in the last 12 hours, computer booted just fine. Damn, so IT is RAM. In the process of finding the faulty one, I played another one and that was good enough too. Needless to say the third should have been the faulty but wanted to give it a try.
Well – Booted again. Just fine.
Now am scratching my head, if all RAMs were working, why not in the last 12 hours. I couldn’t live with the puzzle so googled even more. Finally the answer was, the capacitors in the machine were the culprit which neither charged nor empty. But when I removed and re inserted they got empty and then the fresh start.
So puzzle got solved.
Do you think I would leave the machine running when I go on vacation again?
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