The Things I Fix

I am not a naturally handy person. When I was a kid, I enjoyed building things with Legos, but was never really into taking things apart to see how they worked, tricking out my bike, wood working, electronics, or any of that 'handy' stuff. When Amy and I started dating, she had about 10 times more tools than me (not a difficult feat, since the sum total of my tool collection consisted of a small Swiss Army knife).

However, this has slowly changed over the years to the point where I can sorta kinda fix some things some of the time. Within the past few years, I rebuilt the inside of a sailboat (with the use of a boat shop, some sweet tools, and a lot of really good advice from my friend Chris), rebuilt our back deck, and started doing my own bike maintenance. I also started to do more and more of the repairs to our house, but only up to a certain point.

Since we've been in Belize, I've had to fix a lot of things, mostly bicycles as I've blogged about before. On the bikes, I've replaced three bottom brackets (one of them twice), wheel bearings, headset bearings, pedals, many inner tubes and tires, and entire wheels; and just recently I disassembled and overhauled the coaster brake on my rear hub. Here in our rental house I've repaired door mechanisms, toilets, and light fixtures (the bigger stuff I've left to our property managers)

About three weeks ago I was faced with a very, very big repair challenge. My desktop computer had become increasingly noisy and was getting hotter and hotter. Several months before we moved to Belize the machine was doing the same thing, only much worse, and it got to the point where it wouldn't even boot. I took it to Progressive Tech to get it looked at. Turns out that even though I regularly blow the dust out of the case with compressed air, the cooling system in my graphics card is poorly designed and it traps dust inside the card. So the PT guys took the thing apart, cleaned it up, and it was good as new.

It is pretty dusty here during the dry season and I knew I was dealing with the same problem. I'm pretty comfortable with computers, but not so comfortable with disassembling the components. So I had a look at the tech shop here in San Pedro, CSM 2000, and after perusing their website for about 3.2 nanoseconds decided it would probably not be wise to entrust my family's livelihood to that guy.

However I did buy some thermal paste from CSM 2000, which turned out to be the last tube on the island (whew!).

Here is how the repair went down:

My computer, a Dell Studio XPS

The inside of the computer. Doesn't look too dusty, right?

The graphics card, an ATI Radeon 5770. It is a fairly decent graphics card (very nice for the mapping work I do), so it has a lot of memory and the memory gets very hot. Therefore, it has its own onboard fan. See that blue cable in the upper right hand side?

That blue cable is how the hard drive communicates with the motherboard. Note that it runs through an opening in the graphics card. Very important to do everything in the right order.

The graphics card has been extracted.

I loosened the bracket that holds the heat sink, and the entire card, together (it's the little quasi-x-shaped bit in the upper left). There's a fair amount of dust on the top of the fan housing. Also, note the gray square in the middle of the GPU heat sink, just to the right of the fan housing. It is thermal paste and was dry as a bone and cracked.

Here is the heat exchanger, which I pulled out of the  housing. That's a lot of dust!

I cleared out the dust, removed the nasty old thermal paste, then wiped everything down with alcohol wipes. I applied the new thermal paste, put everything back together in what I hoped was the right order, crossed my fingers--and the machine worked!! And it was much, much quieter.

The most stressful aspect of this entire operation was knowing that if I screwed it up, it would be extremely difficult (or impossible) to get replacement parts. Fortunately for me, my family, and especially my clients, the repair was successful (thus far) and I learned a lot about graphics cards in the process.