It's the sound

Yeah, for the past couple of weeks I've heard the pitch of one of the fans in my BX133 rig going up and down. On Sunday, my wife booted up and used my machine; said it took her three tries to boot. Hadn't had any problems on this machine for quite a long time. So last night, at about 9:00 PM I figure I'll play a couple of games of Age of Empires. 7 tries, no boot.
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Open up the case figuring I need to remove a fan that is causing me voltage problems (probably shorting my PS or something lame like that). My machine boots up this time and I notice one of the 80 mm fans is doing probably moving at about 45 (sic) rpm. Took that puppy out, no more problems. This is the second time I've had a fan that probably wasn't turning cause a machine to be unbootable. As I said, the fan is in a state where it is not turning. Is this a common effect when a fan dies?
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Dave

i've never heard of one spinning that slow. every fan failure i've heard of or seen has been either complete no-motion failure, or a gradual decay of the bearing which can always be heard quite audibly

That's some strange behavior!

But I think you're right about the PSU. When a fan rotates at lower speeds, it draws more current. When it fails, it's drawing quite a lot of current.

If you want, (or you can do this), you could hook a fan to a breadboard with multimeter and measure its current draw, both while running and after stopping it with a pencil. The results might be interesting.

-- Paul

What kind of fan was it???
Was it using a 3 pin mobo plug for power??
Or a Molex connector?

This happned to a friend of mine, he had a 80mm Delta Screamer plugged into his mobo, it was causing major stablilty issues, he switched it to a molex connection and no more problems.

It was 4-pin attached. I don't know if it was one of my Antec's or what. It is in some plastic bag with other wasted in my garage.
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Dave