OK, so it wasn’t entirely a heat problem…. but it sorta was.

The cooling fan on the ol’ XP 2100+ bit the dust, and was only spinning at about 1700 rpm — not enough to keep it cool. In fact, I saw temperatures around 78C last night, and today when I booted the server, the temperature quickly climbed from a balmy 48C through the 50’s before I shut it down.

Off to CompUSA, and nice shiny XP 2700+ has now replaced it. It’s running at 37C, which is more like what I would expect.

My guess is that the fan has been slowly degrading for a while, and it finally got so bad it couldn’t keep up with the demand on the processor.

So, the server should be happy now!