My computer won’t turn on, Christmas morning present.

HAL 900 voice: “Merry Christmas morning DAVE – As a special treat, I have killed your CMOS battery and you will spend the next 2 hours freaking out that your production computer is broken for good. PS. Don’t forget to short out the battery poles to discharge the electricity.”

Carrie and I enjoyed a nice Christmas morning, we exchanged gifts and enjoyed our traditional breakfast ham sandwiches. She picked up her phone and I headed to my office to “check the internet.”

I pressed the on button and my 2.5-year-old computer tried to turn on, then turned off, then on, then off, on, off, on, off… well dangit.

I have to admit, I was freaked out. This is a great computer and has been performing beautifully. It’s a gaming computer but I use it for producing audio and video files, which can be quite demanding on a computer. Having recently rededicated myself to media production, from real estate to YouTube, I’m excited about my future but it’s nothing without this great computer.

So I changed my shorts and started looking for an answer – read, grabbed my iPad, and searched YouTube. I found one guy, but he never mentioned discharging the current, so I ended up disconnecting and opening my computer a second time because I failed to reset the motherboard properly.

This guy is who showed me…

Since I had her (the computer) open, I decided to clean the fans and the intakes and give her (the computer) a good cleaning overall.

She was acting a little glitchy so I took her back a week to an old restore point and that cleaned things up. Once operating properly, I created another restore point.

It’s been 24 hours and my trusty computer has created several videos, and managed 10 GB of photos and videos from Google Drive and she (the computer) seems to be running better (and quieter) ever since.