This is a cautionary tale about how a tiny piece of plastic can disable all the high technology in a PC. My main home machine packed up a few days back and it was not until this weekend that I found time to open it up and find out why.

The PC uses an Athlon 64 processor sitting in Socket 939 on a Gigabyte mainboard. Surrounding the socket is a plastic base with three little prongs on two edges which are used to hook on the CPU cooler and clamp it down. The CPU cooler I had fitted for some reason used only one of these prongs – not enough, as it turned out.

The prong broke, possibly due to stress induced by the hot weather; the cooler dropped off, the thermal cutout kicked in and the machine stopped. I wasted a couple of hours failing to improvise a prong, and it looked like I'd have to dismantle the whole machine to replace the cooler base.

Instead I popped into the Computer Fair that happens every Saturday near London's Goodge Street underground and found a cooler that hooked into all three prongs. Of course there are only two left on one side but I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is one occasion where two prongs really do make a right.