My PC, which I built, is having a problem. I do not know how to fix this problem, because my PC, which I built, is a complete mystery to me, the person who built it.
Last week, my PC completely powered itself down while I was checking out Mars First Logistics. It took a couple tries to restart; I’d press the power button and it would start up, only to power down again at the Windows screen. When it eventually got going, everything was fine–I played Fortnite for several hours with no problem. A few days later, this happened again under the same circumstance: I turned on my PC, then booted up Mars First Logistics, then my PC powered off, then could play other games once it went through a couple restart attempts. My obviously very logical conclusion was that something was going wrong only when Mars First Logistics was the first game I played.
To test this obviously logical theory, I tried a different game after booting. My PC worked for a bit, then powered off and needed several tries to restart. Again, the PC was fine once it restarted, leading me, obviously very logically, to believe the computer was having a problem only with the first game I played upon starting up.
But I knew in my heart this was not a logical conclusion. After digging through my event logs, which I do not understand, and scrolling PC subreddits, which I also do not understand, I was hopeful it was something to do with the latest Windows update, even though I knew this was a long shot. A new update came out yesterday, but my PC powered off while installing it, and then powered off again while I was scanning the event logs for clues. This was bad news–it was now working less than it was working before–but was also good news, because now I have one clear problem–"my PC is randomly powering off"--instead of the much weirder problem of "my PC is randomly powering off only the first time I play a video game on the first boot of the day."
I built this PC. For my birthday in 2014, a bunch of my friends pooled their money to help me build a gaming PC, helping me choose parts and walking me through the process of putting it together. I got all the joy you get out of building a PC, but I did not, strictly speaking, learn to build a PC. Over the years I’ve upgraded it in bits and pieces, always with the assistance of a knowledgeable friend who told me what to buy, and then helped me install it or just did it herself while I watched and pretended I knew what was happening. While I like to tell people “Yeah, I built my gaming PC” because it makes me think Kirk Hamilton thinks I’m cool, a little voice in the back of my head always warned me that, one day, the truth would be revealed.
That day is today! I don’t know what’s wrong here–my best guess is the power supply, which is only from 2020–but it could be any of the random assortment of hardware that clutters my PC, peeking out from badly-organized wires and, in the case of the hard drive, dangling from a single screw I have no idea why I’m using but clearly thought was fine when I did it. I haven’t been inside my PC in a while, and looking at the entire tangle of things crammed inside the case is like trying to remember a dream. What was I doing? What is all this stuff? Why is it plugged in where it is? How does it work?
While this feels like a crisis because I need my PC for this job, it is easily solvable by getting help. But I usually get PC help from my friends, all of whom live hundreds of miles away in New York while I am in DC. So now I’m facing the utterly ignoble situation of having to pay for help from strangers, carting my PC 11 miles to a Microcenter out in the suburbs. It will be very embarrassing to tell a professional I built this and then admit I don’t know anything about PCs. I will be exposed as a fraud and a poser who now has to live in my lies.
Or I will just pay some people some money and they will replace whatever faulty part they will easily be able to diagnose with their knowledge and tools, and on the plus side maybe I can pay them some more money to help me upgrade the graphics card I’ve been planning to upgrade anyway. Of course, saying “I’ve been thinking of upgrading my graphics card” is something someone who built a PC would say, and they will know I am not someone who built a PC, and then what will happen? They will, most likely, simply sell me a graphics card, but I’ll know what they’re thinking. My soul will be forever stained, and my lies will be exposed for all to see, but at least I’ll be able to play video games again.
Update, 1/22/24: My PC is fixed! After purchasing a new power supply and texting my friend blurry pictures of cables as I anxiously installed it, my shutdown situation persisted. But this time I noticed a problem that had previously eluded my eyes: my CPU fan wasn't spinning. One $20 replacement fan later, things are working fine.
While the whole situation was very annoying, and my own ignorance was very depressing, it did encourage me to get back inside my PC and poke around, refamiliarizing myself with what's going in there in the process. I got to remember what the pieces are and where they go, and got comfortable pulling all the stubborn cables out and plugging their delicate, expensive counterparts back in. With my new PSU in place, my cable management situation is truly nightmare levels and will probably be an issue once I put the side panel back on and cables can't just spill out of the PC. But the new power supply opens the door to actually upgrading my graphics card, which is a fun problem and not a bad problem, so I'm feeling pretty good about where things have ended up, even if it was a bummer to get here and entailed purchasing a $200 PSU I didn't strictly need. I really appreciated the advice of our many Aftermath readers and will surely come to you with more problems in the future.
