My Pc Is About to Die
This is another don’t tell me your life post. But I want to.
The thing is, two days ago I left my desktop for a couple of minutes. When I came back, I saw a black screen. No error messages, just a small white line in the top left corner, like indicating I could type, but I couldn’t.
I thought “anyway, maybe it’s just something that made my Linux system crashed”. So I rebooted the PC with the physical button, but after the BIOS logo I was surprised with a Windows error screen. The craziest part is I uninstalled Windows more than a year ago.
It was quite late at that moment, so I waited until yesterday’s evening to fix it. I found in the BIOS settings that the Fedora entry was no longer there, only Windows was listed. My assumption was something happened in the background when I left my computer, maybe an update that touched something related to that. But I don’t know how system updates work, so I’m just assuming things that may be not possible.
It was the second time I had to go through the process of reinstalling/fixing the grub. The first time happened to me when I effectively had Windows in dual boot. This second time things were more familiar, although I also had to look for tutorials, step-by-step guides and some dummy questions to Gemini.
I fixed it. Yeah, but in the process of booting from the USB drive live session I got a kernel panic. My first kernel panic. I didn’t even know how that screen looks like, but I have to say it looks cool.
However, having a kernel panic while trying to boot in a live session from a USB drive made me think something wrong could be with my hardware, because I remember I read/watched/listened to someone somewhere saying that. In fact, I also watched other error messages listed on a black screen after a second try of booting into the USB drive, but I couldn’t take a picture of them.
Once I recovered my Fedora boot entry, I logged into my system and everything looked fine. I used my PC for a couple of hours, and then I turn it off. The next morning (today) I found another screen with more error messages and this time they were clear and explicit. Hardware Error.
Could my CPU really be failing? Maybe it was just the lack of maintenance, I thought. I changed the thermal paste thinking that maybe the CPU was overheating, and apparently it was the case because after that the PC worked again.
HOWEVER. I have Jellyfin installed on my PC, and while I was trying to watch a movie, my PC crashed. It did it three times.
It was enough. Those crashes made me want try to know if it was a software issue. So I tried to put my system into high usage by gaming for a while. But nothing happened. Then I re-tried replicating the Jellyfin issue and the system crashed again.
I’m at a point where I don’t know if I’m having software or hardware issues. Is it something wrong with Fedora? With the Linux kernel? With my CPU? With my RAM sticks? I only hope I don’t have to buy hardware with today’s prices.