Win Modem

With my PC out of danger, I finally had to give up on downloading. My Win Modem was making noises that were nothing short of comical, but I wasn't in a laughing mood. I now regret not having made a recording of those sounds; their inclusion would have greatly enhanced this piece.

My online life had been reduced to taking a hurried look through the sites that I frequent before my connection

*drop*

failed as usual. The e-tox was devastating. I nearly gave up hope that my connection would ever return to normal, and admit that I began to consider the merits of high-speed internet at an amazing low price, with free installation.

*drop*

Then one day I dialed up and got something unexpected: a busy signal. This usually means that either my ISP or the telecom are down. When I dialed up again less than a minute later it connected instantly. Something seemed different... somehow it just felt right. And sure enough, all was indeed well again. Again.

So who gets the blame? In the last five years, any problems with my ISP have been fixed within twelve hours at most. But my telecom provider is an entirely different story. And to think that I almost felt bad about calling their infrastructure "crap." PFFT!

I declared a red alert and turned my computer off until the hard drive cooled down. After rebooting, the drive returned to its overheated state within minutes. And that wasn't the only thing getting hot; the foul minions of IRL were rapidly bearing down on me and I had to choose between meeting them ill-prepared or facing an even more unpleasant alternative: downtime.



With the PC's side panel removed, I set up a table fan aimed directly at the overheating HDD. After giving it some time to cool off, I checked the temperature again using a time-honored method (the Touch Test) and found that the drive was still scorching hot.

*drop*

My wits now sharpened by the fear of losing 200 GB of vital data, I suddenly remembered reading (in an actual book, actually) that when filled to within 15% of capacity a hard drive becomes more error-prone. Following that train of thought, it occurred to me that a nearly-full drive would get hotter as it worked harder to find empty space, and I did mention earlier that I haven't defragged in ages.

*drop*

It turned out that the hard drive was within ~ 3% of capacity, so I deleted some obsolete files to free up more space. It didn't happen right away, but gradually the drive did cool down and disaster was averted.

That didn't resolve my connection problems, though.



*drop*