🚀 go-pugleaf

Today I got to play my least favorite game. I'm sure many of you have
played it too. It's called "find the source of that god-damned squeak
coming from the computer before it drives me (even more) insane".

My PC has been making an intermittent chirping sound - remarkably like
that of a cricket - for the past few months. For a while it was
bearable; a quick thump would chase it away, or it just wasn't loud
enough to notice unless the environment was otherwise completely quiet
anyway. But recently it's been getting louder and finally - after I
realized that even playing music wouldn't cover the noise anymore - I
decided it was Time. Time to move the furnishings and drag the Beast
out of its dusty corner, crack open its night-black carapace, and
Operate.

This isn't the first time I've gone looking for this Squeak; it's a
cunning noise that makes itself scarce as soon as I open the case.
This makes locating it quite tedious, especially as the case has more
fans than good sense would suggest(14, to be precise). I have to wait
for the Squeak to make its presence known, gently open the case, and
try to narrow down where it's coming from before it disappears. 

This took two hours.

I'm still not entirely sure it the cause was one of the CPU fans or if
it was one of the cables nearby that -caught in the draft - was
rattling against the heat-sink. I took no chances and oiled up the
first and taped down the second (or was it the other way around?). It
seems to have done the job, but I'm still not entirely convinced the
problem is solved; this is a clever Squeak and it has been known to
lay low for a few weeks before coming back with a vengeance. 

On the plus side, I once again managed NOT to fry a motherboard with
an errant flash of static electricity. But there's always next time.