Hardware–Heat and Cold

Not all computer problems are caused by software. Sometimes the hardware is the problem. It’s not always easy to tell where the blame lies. One underappreciated factor is the environment. Both mechanical and electronic parts are impacted by heat and cold. There is a reason that computer companies specify operating temperatures.

I think most people understand about overheating but maybe not the problems of to cold.

One day I received a support call from a customer. They were a tomato distributor receiving tomatoes and sending them to supermarkets and grocery stores all over New York City. The problem was that their computer did not work on Monday moorings. Monday afternoon was fine as was the rest of the week. Sure, people have trouble getting started on Mondays but computers should not care about days of the week.

Their computer used floppy disks. Now floppy disks were not sealed in vacuum and the read/write heads had to be a specific distance from the disks. I’d visited the company and knew something about the office. Most of the building was unheated for the good of the tomatoes. I asked if they ran the heat in the office over the weekend. The answer was “no.” The office got pretty cold over a winter weekend. The cold caused the parts of the computer, especially the disk read/write heads to contract pulling away from the disks. As the office  warmed up the tolerances returned to normal and the computer worked just fine.

Electronic parts get hotter as current runs through them. This can cause expansion which can cause all sorts of problems. That’s why fans are installed in computers – to keep things from getting to hot.

Back some years ago, Microsoft donated  a bunch of computers to a school. The computers had been purchased as part of an investigation into counterfeit software. Once the court case was over there was no need to keep the computers. Now these computers had been sitting in a warehouse for quite some time and not all of them were in perfect running order. I was one of several volunteers who were tasked with diagnosing and, hopefully, fixing some of these computers.

One of the computers had a note on it that said it was crashing at a certain part of the installation of Windows. Software problem? Perhaps. So I started an installation and sure enough the computer crashed at the noted location. I tried again but this time the computer crashed almost immediately. So probably not software. I opened up the computer and it seemed a little hot to me. And the fan was not working.

Aha! It turns out that one of the wires connected to the fan was not actually connected. The fan was not getting power and so was not running when the computer got hot. Connecting the wire fixed the problem and everything went perfectly.

It pays to be aware of environmental conditions both inside and outside the computer.