u/goodpostfinder

About 7 years ago I built a PC for my brother. He said it was starting to slow down "a little bit" so I figured I should probably reapply thermal paste. When I actually got to the PC I realized that I had installed windows on his hard drive instead of SSD all those years ago. The PC was slowed down to a crawl, I'd call it unusable but somehow he got used to it.

So the plan was to remove all the gooch, repaste and then get a fresh windows install on his SSD. When I removed the cooler the paste was completely dried to to point of becoming glue, I had to use quite a bit of twisting force to get it off and I tapped one of the two RAM sticks (luckily protected by a metal heatsink). There was no visible damage to either the pads or the slot.

After repasting and reinstalling the cooler I installed Windows which went perfectly fine. I installed HWMon and idle temps were fine, then prime95 to do a stress test and check temps. The test stopped because of a hardware failure. I rebooted and tried again, same result. Tried to reboot again and this time it failed to boot because a checksum failed on some very important DLL. I decided to try to go into the BIOS to reset it to default settings, but unfortunately repeatedly failed to POST (BOOT debug LED stayed on).

So I removed all USB and PCIE devices, removed the RAM stick I might have broken and installed the known good stick in both A2 and B2, neither worked. I also reseated the CPU, no luck.

My brother only used the PC for YouTube and ROBLOX, so the CPU (r5 2600) never really saw a heavy workload. My theory is that it was already on its last legs and that Prime95 run finally pushed it over the edge, is that within the realm of possibilities?

Of course the alternative is that I damaged the A2 RAM slot, but I wouldn't expect it to fail in this way if that's the case. I would expect it not to POST from the get go.

Edit: I should say I also checked the pins and socket when reseating the CPU, nothing out of the ordinary there.

Okay so here's my game theory:

Valve expected orders to trickle in over a few days, in which case fulfillment centers would be able to keep up the pace, send the orders out quickly and honor the 3-5 estimate. Instead all the orders happened at once, which overwhelmed the centers meaning everyone's order (on average) would take longer to be sent.

As soon as they saw the rate at which orders came in they changed the estimate to reflect that, which made many believe there were multiple batches, and wrongly assume they "locked in" a 3-5 day shipping time.

EDIT: Seems the game theory has been confirmed by support https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/1t79bkq/comment/oknm1ih/

You don't need to try out every single new AI tool or javascript library in order to be a good software engineer. Most of the software in the world has already been written using proven technologies, and most development work consists of maintaining it. Think about how many people make a living writing PHP or even COBOL.

You've already learned to code once from absolute 0. No matter how much the industry changes, catching up is going to be infinitely easier than that. Don't waste your time on bleeding edge stuff that is likely going to be replaced a year or two down the line.

Of course it doesn't hurt to experiment if you're passionate about it, but don't burn yourself out on a fictional rat race.