Right. So. I spent a lot of last night lurking around on the internet, and periodically I would pick up the unpleasant smell of hot plastic. I spent hours sticking my face into every niche of my desk area to figure out where it was coming from, only to find no source. Eventually, finally, I pulled the tower out and gave it a smell from ABOVE the back vent, and sure enough, that's where it was coming from.

Apparently my system has three fans, one of which I am unaware of the location (the system fan, since the GPU fan's kind of a given). When I rebooted the computer to check the BIOS, I discovered that while my CPU fan is running at a decent 4000+ RPMs, the system fan was flickering between "low" and 0.

Now, this actually feels pretty silly to ask, but should I be concerned? Because I'm pretty worried, and for some reason I can't get the case open. D8 I've done a lot of switching around with my hardware early in the year and the fact I suddenly can't open the case to check makes this new issue very distressing. T_T

I'm not expert in the area but I would be somewhat concerned. The smell of hot plastic is probably not a good sign. My old computer caught on fire because of something internally was overworked.

I think it was possibly the computer overheating, and the smell is just the heat of the machine burning the plastic, that's my newbie guess at it lol.

The system fan refuses to run entirely; it used to read at a high RPM. ._.; I'm trying to research it, but the whole thing is muddied up by all the jerkfaces wanting to slow theirs down. When I turn the system off, the smell goes away. When I turn it on, it stays gone until it starts to heat up, and then I start to smell it again, so my times on the computer entirely have been short and far distanced.

I'm hoping that looking into OS control of the thing will yeild something of a result. If it does n't, I'm going to be mad because I can't look and see what the deuce is wrong with it myself. I'll also be damned if the motherboard popped another capacitor and is causing this.

Are your fans dusty? If so, clean them. Besides that, I have no idea. I'd just sell it on Ebay for a load and buy a newer, better computer.

... This might be a shot in the dark but...

Have you tried to remove the fan, turn the puter on, and see what happens?
Or get a spare one and replace it temporarily to see if it changes?

Unless of course I have no idea what a System Fan is and it can't actually be removed all that easily.

One of the two.

Taking a bottle of canned air and start blowing the dust out of it, there's a very good chance that's the problem. When computers get really dusty, especially laptops, they have troubles cooling themselves down.

With some help from my dad, the tower's finally been pried open. Now that I can see into the case from the outside, it's very easy to see where the problem lies. The system fan sits in my power supply; my motherboard is, of course, equipped to run it and monitor it from the BIOS, and it really is sitting dead still right now.

There hasn't been much dust in the case since I upgraded my RAM, processor, and graphics card a few months ago, so that can't be the problem. In fact, there's none in there when I look.

If I can figure out an easy way to test if it's the power supply or the motherboard without spending any money, I definitely will. Until then, I think I'm just going to leave the case open to let it "breathe" better. Maybe that odd chirping noise was actually the system fan getting ready to kick it... *thoughtful jaw-rub*

I don't plan on ever selling this thing on eBay, and for multiple reasons. ._. One is that this is a custom build and while running on a 2006 P4 Biostar motherboard, is still better than half of what I might find in prebuilt systems in my price range. Another is that, well, I just recently dropped a hundred dollars into upgrading my RAM and processor, so that also kind of makes it a no-go. Still another is that this thing has been built up and upgraded over the course of about fifteen years, so, while only the floppy drive still remains of the original build (even the tower case has been replaced more than once), it still feels like the same computer dad built for me when I was six.

...Okay, yeah, I'm a little hoity-toity about the whole "buy a whole new computer" thing, but I'd like to think I am so with at least moderately good reason. I prefer to have full control over what's going into my system, both in hardware and software, and I can't really do that by going to the store for a complete PC. Now if I could just fix the car so I can get the replacement motherboard before the one I want stops existing entirely.