A couple of days ago, I was asked by my boss to have a look at one of our office PCs, as she said it was not working. I took off one of the case covers and found that one of the wires of the heatsink fan had broken loose from the fan. I immediately thought - that's it! The fan obviously wasn't spinning on power-up and I guessed that was the case of the PC not starting - the monitor would come on briefly, then turn off! I said we needed to buy a new fan. However, I went into work last night and the PC was working! "How could that be?" I thought. Out of curiosity, I took off a panel of the case and, with the power on, I could clearly see the heatsink fan was still on the heatsink with one of its leads detached (same scenario as I've described above), but the PC was running fine, OS, monitor working, etc. Apparently, someone from the IT section had been in and sorted it out. As far as I know, all they have done is hook-up the PC to the Intranet with a CAT 5 cable. The bottom line is, how can the PC run without the heatsink fan working. Any Ideas, this one has got me stumped?
If the CPU is a low power one, then it may be enough to be cooled passively. Sometimes a heatsink alone is enough.
