Grounded...

Unfortunately my flight simulation PC has been suffering a serious illness for the past few months. First the triple channel memories went bad (one of them), then I had to reinstall the whole OS and reconfigure everything.

Then problems started again with sudden blue screen of deaths so I replaced the remaining two memories with a single channel 4GB (instead of the original 6GB) memory.

Unfortunately black screens of death started to happen, it would simply shut down sometimes right during boot, or configuring BIOS or some 15-20 minutes into system start up.

Fearing my expensive nVidia GTX285 was damaged or overloaded I bought a new nVidia GT200 to get by until I get another high-performance video card. But the problem persists. Very frustrating, bad news is I have spent money I am not earning in buying stuff that didn't resolve the problem.

Today I have done another test though. I turned on the air conditioning (my room is usually 29 Celsius with the fan on) and put on a portable fan blowing more cold air right into the CPU (open case).

This open case surgery seems to have shed new light into the issue.... The system has been running for 3 hours without shutdown with my room temperature at 25 Celsius.

I think the actual problem is not the memory or the video card or the motherboard or PSU as I was suspecting but... "thermal epilectic attacks"  caused by diminished heat transfer between the CPU and the CPU fan.

Most likely after nearly 3 years, two of which at high temperatures and 10-12 hours of use per day have caused the heat transfer gel/cream to break down and causing the CPU to overheat and shut down.

So, off I go to buy that gel and un-install the CPU fan, apply fresh gel and reinstall the fan. Hopefully that will get rid of this very annoying black screens. I can't access any of my information, let alone fly!!! so I have been grounded for quite a while.

Keep tuned for more exciting flights, just hope I don't have to order components (motherboard, PSU) abroad.