Thin Puppy's fan

I thought that it was the power drain from the CD-R drive that made the Thin Puppy's fan turn on, but it turns out that the fan's sudden spin to life had nothing to do with the added drive. I confirmed this by pulling the drive out from the Thin Puppy, which was lying on its side to accomodate the short cables. Once I removed the CD-R, the fan stayed on. When I stood the Thin Puppy upright, the fan went off. Put back on its side again, the fan starts up. Strange. Is there a short in the wiring that somehow resolves itself when the thing is turned at a 90-degree angle? I can't worry about it too much because the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) never gets all that hot. The VT133 portion of the chipset gets the hottest, but the Via C3 1 GHz CPU never gets that hot -- and it's got a heatsink that's piped and connected to the metal case for maximum heat transfer, so there's really nothing to worry about.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't boot any Debian-derived CDs with the CD-R drive hooked up, but I'm happy that Puppy Linux is comfortable with 256 MB of RAM. I pulled the CD-R drive while the thin client was running, so now it'll stay running as long as it doesn't crash ... or I get a new CF card and reboot it ... or ????