I’ve been using PCs for more years than I care to admit. And, while the early PCs didn’t need or have cooling systems, I’m fairly sure that most PCs for the last decade have had a combination of heat sinks and fans on the processor to cool it down. An old PC running Windows XP started acting oddly a couple of weeks ago. Then, it started spontaneously rebooting after, I think, less than 10 minutes of use. I assumed it was bad RAM and opened up the cover to do a little diagnostic work. After removing 1 of the 2 DIMMs, I turned on the PC and noticed the fan on top of the CPU heatsink stuttered but didn’t spin up. So, I rummaged around the remains of other dead PCs and found a fan that fit reasonably well, screwed it down and plugged it in. The PC seems to be running ok with the replacement fan now. But, I’m still surprised to have seen my very first CPU fan failure after all these years. It is not one of those parts that I expect to see go bad.
Any PC tech worth their salt will know that the two most common failures in any PC is: a fan or a hard drive. Why?
MOVING PARTS.
Jimbo: I’m not a PC tech, but I have seen dozens if not hundreds of PCs and servers over the decades. And, I’ve never seen fan fail before (though perhaps I should be surprised by this). The two most common failures I’ve seen are RAM and hard drives in that order. If I had to pick a third most common failure, it would be the power supply.