Nothing is more frustrating when you’re working and poof – your monitor goes black and your system stops responding.

I had the joy of that experience today with my primary email and ASP.NET 1.1 development machine. The same machine that has the last 10 days of code updates to the ASP.NET forums (for the new search functionality), the last several months of email, and chapters from both a SAMs and an MSPress book I’m working on. So began 2 hours of my day trying to figure out what the heck happened.

Was it a problem with Windows – seemed to be since I got a couple bluescreens while trying to bring the machine back online – or was it a problem with the hardware? Turns out it was a hardware problem. One of the processor fans – it is a dual proc. – was broken and the processor was overheating.

The odd thing is that this is the second hardware problem I’ve had in the last 2 days. Yesterday one of our web servers for www.asp.net decided to go belly up. So last night and today I’ve had the joy of rebuilding the server and fixing all the bugs that got reintroduced: forgot to turn off request validation and to set the <machineKey /> values.

Is it coincidence or have I somehow angered the hardware gods 🙂