Our GE Profile Arctica (PSS25MGMAWW) side-by-side has stopped all cooling (fridge and freezer), allowing everything to warm up and leading to food loss. This is not the first time and in the past it would come back to life, so to speak, but now it won't. I don't know what part is failing that would act like this.

This first happened in October or so. By sheer coincidence, I found that it went "back to normal" after sitting overnight turned off (not unplugged, but flashing-zeroes). A couple weeks later, shortly before Thanksgiving, it happened again. I turned it off, left it off for a couple hours, and then when I turned it back on, "back to normal" again. (Obviously not really normal since none of this would normally happen.) Luckily, it behaved itself through the holidays.

When it's not cooling, it sounds like it's running but not with the full loudness of when it's really running. There is no clicking or other sounds of failure per se, but a couple different levels of fan-like or motor-like sounds are all we get.

When it happened again last night I'd hoped to get it to come back to life by leaving it off, but it's not doing that. I don't really know if sitting in the "off" state was really a factor before or if that was just a coincidence.

Some reading I did online implied that it might be related to the defrost cycle getting stuck in the no-cooling mode, and I think(?) that parts for that might be something I could replace (but I'm no electrician or appliance tech). On the other hand, I don't want to order parts for a fridge that is actually dead and I need to give up on.

Any hints/tips/info would be appreciated. Right now we're pretending we're camping. Luckily we bought a small chest freezer after the first failure and we're using that, "blue ice," and a large cooler to get by for now, but clearly this is not effective for the long term.

Thanks for the input. I'll look into how to verify those things are working or not. I suspect the compressor is not running, though, due to absence of vibration.

Just to clarify, I had not tried unplugging it, just turning the cooling completely off (to get the flashing-zeroes display on the fridge/freezer temperature settings). I did try unplugging it this time, and left it unplugged for 30 seconds or so -- an old habit for rebooting other electronics -- but that seemed to have no effect.

Right now it's just a large, 400-pound water filter (the water line filter being rather expensive and something we just replaced, natch). I assume that if it truly is the compressor that has failed, "big water filter" is all this appliance will be until I find a way to get rid of it, since the compressor kit has been discontinued and is no longer available. {sigh}

II guess just about anything is possible but I dougt it is the capacitor,.
Note that I have been wrong in the past.

Can you check to see if the compressor is getting 120 volts.
if it is and it does not run it is toast.

Just to follow up (for future reference), replacing the run capacitor had no apparent effect.