Slashdot Mirror
Requiem For A Motherboard
JimLynch writes "In my last DIY column, I discussed what it was like to build my first system. As time went by, unfortunately, my DIY system wasn't all wine and roses. This column tells the story of how I destroyed my motherboard through a series of ill-planned and stupid actions. It should stand as a shining example of What Not to Do for DIYers everywhere."
I checked the temperature of my motherboard with SiSoft Sandra. The readings I got showed that it was too hot indeed. I was skeptical of Sandra's exact readings, however, so I posted a note in the forum and received some good suggestions for alternative programs to check the temp with.
Not very smart, are you? You smell your computer burning, but you start up Windows anyway (most BIOSes have temperature monitors built in) and mess around. Just...wow.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
This has to be by far one of the worst things i've seen posted on slashdot. Really, the fact that someone even took the time to write this article amazing me.
How many ways can I destroy a computer... yahh
Maybe if there were good gory pictures or something
Gamblers Forum
I have seriously manhandled about 150 computers, ripping out the motherboards, making frankenstein boxes out of non-working boxes, hot swapping non hot-swappable hard disks, forcing fans onto cpus, pulling out running SCSI discs to get that gyroscopic effect because the disks are still spinning at 10K rpms. I must have had some luck though. Never once have I broken a machine.
found out one time that an iMac keyboard can hold exactly one pint of beer...
at least it had a use for something..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I shouldn'ta broke off the white thingie."
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
I sympathize with this man's problems that have to do with computer temps. It's very hard to get the hot air to flow out, instead of having a mish-mosh of air currents within your case. If fans wouldn't work for him, you could just go the hardcore road of water cooling... none of that "hot air" is involved, although a conventional water cooling system is much more expensive then fans. Its the ever debated balance between $$ and quality.
Knocks parts off the motherboard, wasn't grounded, refused to measure fan sizes before buying them. And I am still only halfway through the article. Can be summed up in one sentence:
Feckin' eejits shouldn't mess around inside the computer!
Download my free songs!
Geeze, who is the author of this lame article. Should I start writing articles about my trip to the grocery store? I wounder if I could get published, well at least I could get slashdotted...
*sigh* this articles so lame, it just makes me laugh to hard.
Gamblers Forum
This and many other sites like it offer a Print option that puts the whole story on one page. With the likelyhood that slashdot is going to take this site to task, it would be a good idea to get it all on one page before you start reading. That way, you won't get blue mouse trying to get to page 2.
I dunno, I tried real hard on a graphics card comparison to kill a board, swapping cards fast, and, oops, forgot to power off before reboot...
That was several years ago and all the boards survived. Buy quality components is probably the best lesson!
It should stand as a shining example of What Not to Do for DIYers everywhere.
You betcha. Here are some gems:
When I returned, I smelled the distinct odor of something burning. -snip- Just for the heck of it, I checked the temperature of my motherboard with SiSoft Sandra.
Mistake number 1. If you smell smoke, go for the plug, not Sandra!!
You knocked off a "white doohickey" and didn't check to see if it was something that was soldered to the board?
Yeah, that could be a problem. Learn the names of your doohickeys, at least. Then post here - we could use the giggles.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The first time I built a computer, I figured that if a few of those metal support posts were good, more would be better. That's why they gave me a whole bag, right? I assembled the system and it wouldn't start. I did some troubleshooting, succesfully booted with the board out of the case and eventually solved the problem.
That's as dumb as I've gotten -- perhaps I should be writing for ExtremeTech instead? I know my first response to trouble isn't to ask in a forum what new heat sink will make me more 1337.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'm so happy that there are so many people out there like this, otherwise a lot of us would have to go out and get real jobs...
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
My heart started pounding as I first opened the page. I saw the exact same case I am slowly building into my dream system (well. . . ok, so I only have the case, and power supply, but one day, it will be my dream system). BTW. . . I don't like his harsh comments about the case, he should have known by the posted diminsions and specs that it wasn't a light little case.
Maybe I should start writing articles for various computer tech sites, I have more experience (as I am sure most of /. does) than this guy.
This article all in all is okay for any beginner that is considering building his own system, but by know means is there anything worthwhile for a professional.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
The reason the motherboard started smoldering? The CPU maxed when he tried to load one of that site's webpages. It's impossible to pick out any actual content on that page amongst all the adverts, links, and folderol.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
^^ Overview of the moral of the story.
... :wtf:
... cooking, DIY, car repair.
Seriously, "white doohickey"
Yeah, I've done the "install heatsink after motherboard" thing in a tight case, and it wasn't amazingly fun but I just calmly did it. Approaching anything in a hurry will lead to a fuck up
Quite often, fans on motherboard (north bridge, to be exact) are redundant. Those fans also make a lot of annoying whining noise (obviously, being small & all).
;-).
I replaced mine with just a heatsink, and so far everything's been fine. Almost broke my motherboard in the replacement process, of course.
So next time you are shopping for a motherboard - ensure that there is *no* fan on the north bridge. Overclocking the north bridge is so 90's anyway
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Well this should be your first sign.. i'm not saying that you have to be an electrical engineer to plug some PC boards together, but atleast spend 30 seconds on google to find out what it those capacitors are. I know he's prolly joking, but as simple as microsoft and apple try to make them, certain aspects of PC's are far from simple, so my suggestion is atleast have SOME familiarity before your act suprised that it blows up.
Area man who didn't know anything about cars filled up his radiator with motor oil and overheated his engine. News at 11...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Eat while working on PCs
Attempt to wash circuit boards, unless you have a ready source of de-ionized water, and it's still iffy
Dry sensitive electronic components with a blowdryer with the heat on
Install/remove heatsinks with wrong tools. I nearly chopped one of those tiny resistor packs in half with a cruddy old screwdriver
Let dust accumulate until it looks like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag
Also, keep an eye on those electrolytic caps, in the past some leaked and caused a real mess.
In other news:
Every now and then Google News does something weird, I thought the combination of heading and article were interesting:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There are some tips you should know, like installing the cpu and heatsink before the mobo is in the case. And making sure you screw in the mobo with the correct standoffs.
let me say this:
[Nelson voice]
Ha ha!
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you don't know what you are doing, then either take it to or buy from someone who does. I mean come on, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. I don't know how to fix cars, so do I fix my car when something breaks? No. I take it to a mechanic. Jeez, some people are really hurting in the common sense department.
Agreed. I haven't built a system since an O/C Celeron 2 800 running at 900 Mhz was a kickass system, but in my experience the hardest part was figuring out with components your board supported. Most componenets could ONLY be connected the right way and it was just about impossible to connect things the right way in the wrong place. As my co-workers used to say when I worked at Old Navy: "A partially trained Monkey could do the job, and the customers would probably treat him better"
Building my first PC was no where near as confusing as the first bike I built, or the Car Engine I hope to rebuild in the future (as soon as I can listen to one of those muscle car guys talk about engines without my eyes glazing over, and parts of my brain BSODing)
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Used to be, back in the old days, if you were feeling a little masochistic you'd do a little bit of self-flagellation. Nowadays, you see if you can get a quarter million people to laugh at you all at once.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Later, I found that when I had put the memory in, one of the plastic pegs that separated the mobo from the metal case fell off and the half the mobo was touching the metal case. I am not sure which short circuited first, but... game over, man. Lost everything but the hard drives, CD-ROM, and floppy drive.
From the article, as a heading..
"More Stunning Incompetence"
yes.. that sums up this entire slashdot article and that article and everything on that page.
and this makes news today.. wow.. geeks everywhere must be finally getting laid..
*sigh*
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
the only MB i fried blew a capictor and from what the tech people could tell it was just a bad part and nothing I could have done about it it was going to blow eventualy.
The ultimate lessons are "Use your head." and "Check and cross-check the specs."
i've built dozens of computers since 1987 and have cracked the case on thousands of others, literally. I've never toasted a part but for once, and that was an improperly soldered CPU board on a Compaq Proliant 2500 back in 1996. A surface-mount capacitor just fell off the board. Warranty replacement - the system was brand new.
Now, i've seen bad boards, particularly in the lower quality side of the Taiwanese parts market back in the late 80s, when if you ordered 10 motherboards you might expect 2 or 3 to fail. Never got any, though. I hear the same thing is true with some of the cheaper SiS based boards today.
I don't think it's all luck. Quality parts selection and careful handling will take you a long way.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
***Like most of you, when I need a question answered, I usually hop right into the forum. The ET forum is blessed with the presence of many extremely experienced DIY people who almost always have helpful suggestions or at least a definite point of view on DIY issues.
***
welll, it might shock you but if the question is "what's burning??" I DON'T CHECK INTO THE FORUMS as the first thing, I'm kind of old fashioned in the sense that in a case like that I turn off the computer and see wtf is wrong with it..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Wow, he knocked a 'white doohickey' off his motherboard, walked around with it while his arm hairs were standing up straight from static electricity, and still expected the thing to work? What a chump. But not nearly as chumpy as someone who would do these things (i.e., me, with my first DIY system):
1. jammed a DIMM in backwards (this is hard -- the slot is asymmetric to avoid this very thing), turned the machine on, and quickly smelled the sweet smell of burning plastic as the DIMM holder melted, then tried to turn the machine off but forgot that you have to hold the power button down for several seconds, and stinking up the entire house before just pulling the damn plug...
2. vacuumed the dust out of the inside of the case while the machine was running, accidentally tapping the spinning CPU fan with the tip of the vacuum attachment, and snapping one of the fan blades off, making it spin out of control like a unbalanced centrifuge and making a horrible loud noise...
3. speculated that random machine crashes were being caused by a poorly-mounted heat sink, so removed the sink and turned the machine on, heard a loud "BEEEEEEP" and no start-up, then put his finger on the exposed die of the CPU to feel what was going on--OHDAMNIT'SHOTHOTHOTHOT, and enjoying the sweet smell of burning fingertip flesh...
Why has this article been published on Slashdot anyway? Just to make fun of the poor fellow?
Or maybe Slashdot readers suddenly became a bunch of dumb wannabe geeks who really need that kind of "tips" and I haven't noticed yet.
I find that having everything you might need next to you before you start building/reparing a system is the best way to avoid danger. Then ESD is not a problem as long as you periodically keep touching the case, as long as there is no potential difference between you and the case you should be fine. The more you move around the more chance of you building up charge.
It also helps to read manuals and how-tos if you are new to this stuff.
xray
This guy wasn't just forcing it, he was handling it in the most slapdash manner possible! And how could he get a heatsink that barely fits the case? Where's all the air going to go?!
Bah. Here's what I learned about building a machine:
1. Buy as much as possible from the same retailer. That way when something goes wrong, there's no back and forth on it.
2. Buy from a store. There are a lot of "cheap" internet sites that will happily sell you unreliable hardware, then become hard to contact afterwards. Swap meets are an especially bad place to purchase new hardware components. With a store, you can walk through the door and strangle the guy behind the counter.
3. Buy as big of a case as you possibly can. This will allow you a lot of room to work on the inside, as well as good airflow and extra mounts.
4. Find out what every cable is *before* you plug it in. Also, make sure which direction it goes. Sometimes they need forcing, but only force after you're SURE that it's supposed to fit that way.
5. Take your time and assemble the components as early as possible. Some things can only be inserted inside the case, but others (such as CPU, fan, and DIMMs) can be assembled outside the case. It also never hurts to leave things like the hard drive unplugged just to make sure your system turns on and functions. Remember, SLOWLY.
6. Buy quality components. It may look cheaper to buy that AZUZ motherboard instead of the ASUS one, but the difference is tremendous.
One last tip: don't buy the latest and greatest processor unless you absolutely have a reason to do so. The performance difference between that and the next model down is almost imperceptible due to wait states in the CPU. You're much better off investing your money into more RAM. Less heat, more speed. For gaming, go for the best vid card, though. Unless you like to upgrade, you'll be with it for a long time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Works for computers AND intercourse.
no kidding. I dunno if it was worthy of a slashdot article. Perhaps it should have been posted in the sysadmin blunders (follow link in sig). Still, it was funny to read about all his screwups.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Submited by GeorgeW.
In my last radio address I discussed how it was like to rule USA for the first time. As time went by, unfortunately, my country wasn't all wine and roses...
Clearly you should have used a UPS, then set up a script that detects when the power is killed and starts looping a WAV file of sirens blaring and a robotic voice saying "MAIN POWER FAULT" at 90dB.
I built a system off of the Sharky Extreme budget PC components back in November. I loaded up the basic stuff and had a few extra components laying around like a Geforce 4ti and a Soundblaster Live card.
I only run Linux on it and never even installed Windows at all, everything is fully supported by Linux.
The only problem I have with it is over heating. I have a nice heatsink/fan sitting on the AMD 2500+ and I'm not overclocking it at all. But still, I have to have the case open and a small table fan pointed right at the motherboard to keep the temperatures down to 44c...otherwise it raises to 55c+ with the side panel on and the two case fans running.
I've seen the temp jump up to 61c-62c which from what I've heard is either fine to it's too hot. I've heard the gamut of people saying it's not a problem and not worry about it.
But here's the rub...I run Gentoo Linux, and since I compile everything, I don't want it overheating while in a compile...as an error could easily be compiled into code and be almost impossible to track down a bug....or so I've heard. This has NEVER happened to me. I guess I'm just extra paranoid about the temp.
Other than my paranoia, everything runs tip-top and is very speedy. First computer I've built from scratch (not to mention the first OS I've built from scratch) and everything is ok. Other than me running the memory as single channel DDR instead of Dual channel for 3 months because I had it in the wrong slots. D'OH!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I agree. A twit makes one mistake after another.. while I make plenty of mistakes (not in the least in the hardware department), there's no point in reading about another twit's ones on slashdot.
Where can I get white doohickies? I'm a EE and this is a new one on me. What is the V-I characteristic of the doohicky? Is it a linear device? Please, someone who knows, tell me more.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How is the 'Extreme' tech guy just nnow installing his first mobo? I mean, that shit should be a prerequisite to having a writing gig at a site called 'Extreme Tech'. I guess they are so extreme that their people have never built their own machine before.
If this guy works in IT he should be fired. This is a prime example of why I have a job and why I give people too much credit. Doohicky? If you don't know a resistor or a capacitor when you see one, you probably don't need to build your own pc. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
IMHO this was a great post I loved it... This was like a good book, couldn't wait to click to the next page and read on. I am sure every DIY has done at least one dumb thing that cost them some monitary pain. It was just humbling to know that I don't have the worst story :)
So this guy who doesn't know what he's doing decides that he can tell others what to do?
The clueless leading the clueless.
I mean, it would be expected from somebody at THG..
Actually, now that I think about it, THG will probably post these article soon enough.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
After smelling smoke, I reached for the plug, and turned to find the ZIF socket a smoldering mass melted into the motherboard. Removing the Bright green Cyrix heatsink from the ZIF socket revealed that I had shattered the ceramic block that encased the CPU chip.
I took the melted motherboard, cracked CPU, and the faulty manual back to the store and they acknowledged that the manual was wrong. They gave me a new mobo, and a used but working CPU, even though I had only bought the board from that store.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Perhaps a beginner like the author should start with one of the mini-ITX's, like the ones made by Shuttle. I've built several PC's, but this was the easiest by far because it's already mostly done. The MB's already in with all the outside connectors attached, so all you have to do is add the CPU and RAM, then plug in the drives.
With "Loyd"'s comments, this is sort of like MST3K for bad computer articles.
For all the disparaging comments, the one good thing that comes of all this is this: Cheap Hardware. I've built a lot of machines and only once had a problem with overheating when I didn't quite get the heatsink on the CPU perfectly ... no burning smell, just the temp in BIOS rising swiftly was enough to make me pull the plug.
I've got another "jinx" friend who fries motherboards and graphics cards regularly. I laugh at him quietly so as not to give myself bad computer karma and realize that the more people feel that they can DIY, the cheaper components will get. Good can come from idiots of the world, however reading this is like reading Darwin Awards for computer retards.
Your screwdriver license has been revoked.
...all geek chicks out there: Don't breed with this guy unless you WANT stupid children!
And here it is.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Ahhh...the origin of a future Macintosh zealot!
WTF would this guy do with 9 fans?
I don't want it overheating while in a compile...as an error could easily be compiled into code and be almost impossible to track down a bug....or so I've heard.
Just making sure everyone saw this gem.
In my last co-op term before I graduated, I heard one guy call it a "campacitor".
No, that's not a typo. He put the "m" in there when he talked. It wasn't just once; every time he meant to say "capacitor", he said "campacitor".
Oh, right: My degree is in Electronics Engineering.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Wow, this guy is a piece of work. Whoever accepted the story for publication must REALLY have a sense of humor. I seriously hope that the article is either a spoof or the article is real and the editor has a really twisted sense of humor, the alternative reasons are just too terrifying to consider.
It was probably one of those spacers that sit between the motherboard and the case. these things drop off easily when lifting the mobo from the back plate
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Why would cutting power kill your motherboard?
Worst that could happen is if power dropped in the middle of flashing a BIOS, but that's recoverable via a quick trip to the nearest little computer shop that has an EPROM burner (or warranty replacement if your bios is a TSOP)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's GCC, not Gentoo. If the computer flips a bit and GCC puts that into the code, the resulting bug can be damn near impossible to find. Short of having an assload of time, a good debugger, and being damn near a genius, forget it.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
When you get a new part its hard to contain your excitement - you want it installed yesterday. This agitation can lead to all kinds of mistakes. Throughout my long history of building upgrading computers some of my favorite moments include:
Plugging my nifty Amiga video chip (Super Denise)upgrade in backwards. Causing all kinds of nice colors to appear on the screen. Luckily it didn't fry the chip.
Cranking down the lever on the socket to my brand new Pentium 200 - and then noticing that one of the pins was sticking out of it at a right angle. Several anxious seconds with a pair of tweezers straightened the pin out without breaking it off but it was a close thing.
Before embarking on any upgrade I try to sit down, lay out the components, make sure I have all my tools and get a plan of attack in my head. Oh yeah and suck down a cold one before I begin hehe.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Don't breed with this guy unless you WANT stupid children!
I'll say! This guy is a class-A moron...
a knife! (as in knife and fork)
Ok this was years ago. I was sharing a house and one of my colleagues asked if he could borrow this PC while I was on holiday....
When I got back he said it was u/s and didn't know why. The hdd didn't boot because he had unplugged the IDE cable and put it in the wrong way around -
not all cables were polarised back then.
Prior to this butchery, undertaken with a knife, no antistatic protection and zero common sense, he had found a problem occuring with the OS. So he panicked and duplicated it...
Oh yes. The parallel port gave up the ghost.
And then I found out that he'd taken out the BIOS IC to try in another computer!!!!!!
Never ever lend anyone a computer you value even remotely. The motherboard he gave me as a replacement was a faulty piece of junk.
To this day I really don't know how I managed to hold back from punching his lights out. He was very very worried for a few weeks...
Lets face it. Some folk shouldn't be let near anything electrical, mechanical or chemical.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
The meta-bug: Failure to isolate problems one at a time.
If he'd simply concentrated on what was wrong (bad fan on heatsink), he never would have purchased the new heatsink. He would never have purchased a new case to fit the new heatsink. He would never have had to remove the motherboard and fuck it up by knocking parts off in his failed attempt to put it into the new case. He would never have needed a new motherboard, and he never did need a new case.
> Can be summed up in one sentence: Feckin' eejits shouldn't mess around inside the computer!
You have a gift for understatement. Describing this guy as a "feckin' eejit" is akin to describing Valles Marineris as a "ditch".
Constructive advice: The difference between feckin' eejits and the clued is that the clued try to solve one problem at a time. CPU running insanely-hotter than normal? Solve that problem - and only that problem. After you've solved that problem, then you can think about getting better solutions like a quieter heatsink/fan, a snazzier case, or a new motherboard. Solving one problem at a time means that the "solution" to the first problem doesn't necessarily have to fix anything -- it could be that you wanted to upgrade the old box anyways, so just power off the damn thing and buy your new box.
Nothing quite like getting overruled by a manager
..."
to go out and buy XYZ brand (BTO) computers just
because the OS (linux) was tested on same. More
than 50% of arrived computers either "rattled"
or suffered "sudden infant death" syndrome. Turns
out the BTO manufacturer hired employees' kids
to assemble them, and they tore off the flashcard
socket on the bottom of the MB when putting them
in the case.
I could have built the same number of computers
myself in less time than it took to straighten
out this mess. The manager was under the
mistaken impression that using another platform
(like Dell 1U servers) would have been too
costly, and would not have worked reliably with
linux.
WTF was my opinion, with 8 years of linux
exposure, worth? ZIP. And the cost was
a serious slip in production delivery. Pretty
damn glad to see the last of those boxen.
The entire point is: "Don't let some newbies
in a big fscking hurry get near the insides
of a computer, let alone ones destined for
production use
I wouldn't worry about the CPU temperature. My old XP 1800+ ran at ~60 degrees all the time, and higher on hot summer days. And it did so stably and without any complaint. (The airflow in that case sucked.)
I don't know how such temperatures will affect the overall lifetime, but I'd guess that even if it should fail prematurely someday, it will still be far enough in the future for you to want an upgrade anyway.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
thanks for pointing it out for everyone...but as I said, that's what I've heard...if I'm wrong please enlighten me.
Not everyone is born an expert in these things.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
At least that's how it was explained to me!
Best Buy can have you arrested
That's what I ment, just it being Gentoo and everything is compiled. So while gcc is compiling firefox and it "flips a bit", that could compile an error into the firefox code, correct? Which is why I've heard many times not to be overclocking while your compiling anything.
Thanks.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
engines, (and computer HARDWARE) are easy! its the software and the actual engineering that is the difficult part.
It bothers me to no end when people try to pretend that their stupidity is normal and that they're trying to help you out by telling you not to do the thing(s) that they obviously should not have.
Gee, did you guys know that you shouldn't stick a lit cigarette in your eye?
Don't use hot sauce for you 'roids!
NTITE
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Why on earth is this on the front page of /.???
Someone please tell me. I am confuzzed
blah, blah, blah
But I prefer shopping at well known internet sites than compusa. The guy behind the counter earning min wage doesn't give a rats ass about your problem. It doesn't do any good to kill him for the corperate policy, and unless you have access to pig farm body disposal is a major headache.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If they can't build a computer, why should we trust anything they have to say about computers on their website?
I've been building many a PC in my day. The first one I ever did is still humming away in the other room with my blog running on it. The BX chipset is by far the most reliable and stable motherboard chipset ever made. And the Abit BX6r2.0 is the best board with that chipset.
Anyway, I've never had a problem putting computers together. The reason for that is lots of research on the internet. Before I get ready to build a box I check everything. I never buy incompatible parts. I don't skimp on cost and risk getting a part by a no-name manufacturer. You don't know how many times I see people with broken hardware from no-names. Pay the extra 30 bucks and get the big name brand stuff. Abit, Asus, Leadtek, Gainward, Creative, Seagate, Corsair, Crucial, etc. If you get a video card from randomtaiwantech and it doesn't work, there's a reason.
However, me and my roomate did make a big mistake once. The reason was that there was no documentation concerning the issue on the net, and to this day, there still isn't. The first time I built a computer with a Duron isntead of a Pentium it wouldn't boot. I couldn't figure it out. The company I bought the computer from either didn't know. But what they should have noticed on my invoice was that I had a 300W power supply and that I needed more. Eventually after several RMAs I had a 300W power supply that worked somehow magically.
Later my roomate got a new PC and it had the same trouble. My computer died soon after and we realized something. The power supply is important and 300W isn't enough anymore. Motherboard manufacturers! In the documentation for a motherboard list how big a power supply is needed! You have no idea how long it took us to figure out what was wrong with several completel seperate machines not booting in the same fashion.
Let this be a lesson.
1) do research
2) do more research than is possible
3) don't be cheap
4) if you know what you're doing it wont go wrong.
Needless to say my current box has a huge expensive 450+ Watt Enermax PSU. I will never have THAT problem again.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
If your processor was to overheat, the computer would just freeze. On the slim chance that garbage was incorporated into your binary, it would just crash when you ran it. The chances of some incorrect but "meaningful" bits being written are vanishingly small.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are places in a computer where you can scimp and buy cheap- Go ahead and get a 5400 hard drive, cheapo sound card, integrated video (Nforce video isn't horrific). But Motherboard and Ram are the heart of a system. Cheap components there will lead to an unstable and frustrating DIY experience.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Link is here.
Thanks for the info, and as I said before, I've never had my computer freeze up ever. But I've seen everything from "60c isn't bad" to "60c is one step below the entire computer bursting into flames". Was just trying to be more safe than sorry...but what you say makes sense.
Again, thanks
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
the part that made me ill was him not knowing what doohicky he knocked off.
I can relate to components not fitting in certain configurations;CD rom drives that were 2cm to long for the mobo/case combination i was trying to install them in, or powersupplys right up against cpu heatsinks blocking the air flow. with infinite combinations comes infinite ways to screw things up.
I once put a HUGE heatsink/fan combination on a CPU for a friend. it was an aerocool deep impact limited edition (gold plated heatsink with iridescent fans) as seen here without the 80mm fans mounted on it or the gold plating. i had to use a dremel to trim the shroud around one of the fans so it would clear a memory module. but I figured "hey, you can't see it from my house"
"He's a real midnight golfer"
What are you, homicidal?
I was working at ChimpUSA about 7 years ago in the upgrades department. A woman with the 'clueless drone' expression came up and asked for a new cpu and mobo.
"Would you like us to istall it for you?" (Not an attempt at selling over-priced services, just an attempt to prevent the inevitable.)
"No, I'll do it myself"
After the requsite hour she called back and claimed that the mobo didn't work.
"Did you hook up the power supply? Make sure the CPU was properly seated? Checked the RAM? Plugged in the drives? Proper grounding on backplane screws?"
She answered yes to each question as I explained each of them to her. After a good 30 minutes of trouble shooting...
"Oh yeah, when I was putting the motherthingy in, I poped off a brown cylinder with my screwdriver. is that important?"
"Hmmm, yeah, capaciters can be important. They probably didn't put it on the board to look cute."
And that is how I know the guy. I sold a mobo to his mother. "...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Rebuilding an engine is kind of like upgrading your computer.
You get to:
1. Buy tools to do the job right.
2. Have screws and bolts left over after every trek under the hood/in the case.
3. Get to swear you'll never touch this goddamn piece of crap again when it fails to start/turn on.
4. Be overjoyed at the sound of sweet exhaust/bios beep when you're finally finished.
The only real problem with cars is that they don't stay perfect forever. But I guess the same could be said for case fans/hard drives etc.
I've worked on cars for about 6 years now, got the bug from friends in college. Some days I hate having to fix my cars, but others, I look at the savings.... that is, after I learn what to buy etc.
Karnal
I'm sorry, but the advertisement on the left of that story is just too damn annoying to make reading the story bearable.
If you start referring to motherboard components as "doohickeys", *stop what you are doing immediately* and call someone whose head is not firmly planted between his/her buttocks.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Damn you for using imperial.
Damn you straight to wherever people get sent for that. There shall be a day of reckoning, and all these guys that make me measure and convert stuff in inches and feet will hear the bell toll for them.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It's because you're using the stock fan. Spend about $30 w/ shipping a buy a nice Thermaltake Volcano 7+ (the one I use). I've had it since my Athlon XP 1900+ and overclocking it to 1900 mhz and it has stayed with me to my 2400+. It cools better than most of the cheap watercooling kits ($100-$150) and is a lot cheaper. I'm overclocking my 2400+ to 2256 mhz (150 mhz FSB from 133 mhz FSB, 256 mhz overclock), the Volcano 7+'s fan controller is set on high, and my max temp is about 53c.
Also, make sure you have at least 2 fans in the front and 2 fans in the back (if they're 80mm fans). Two 120mm fans would probably do just as good or better.
So while gcc is compiling firefox and it "flips a bit", that could compile an error into the firefox code, correct? ,,somehow to easy'') doublecheck and correct!
Firefox wouldnt matter too much - a bug in glibc would be annoying. But most of the time the compile simply fails - if you compiles fail on different source code lines (inreproducable) you can be pretty sure it is a hardware problem (overheating or bad RAM).
Which is why I've heard many times not to be overclocking while your compiling anything.
Thats a good advice. My current system ran at 85C when first assembled (And mainboard, CPU and cooler came as a bundle). Starting a compile locked the system. My brothers system even failed trying to install Windows XP because of lockups. Checking the CPU temperature in the BIOS we saw a temperature of 120C (on my system because of the compile, on my brothers system even when idle.). We decidered there just wasnt enough pressure from the Cooler (Arctic Copper Silent Pro) on the CPU - so we manufactured two thin copper plates of about 0.8 mm width and did put it between the mounting piece and the cooler. We now needed much more force to press the cooler onto the CPU, but both systems now run stable on 50C.
So:
Dont trust manufacturers. Even good ones. If something seems weird (like cooler that could be pressed onto the CPU
One night, I was upgrading my PC, when all of a sudden it went berserk. The screen started flashing and it was like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
And then, like half my motherboard was gone. And I was, like, Nnng?. It was a really good motherboard too. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast and so it wasn't as good. It was kind of a bummer..
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Being the geek that I am, there no way I'm going to buy something and not upgrade it or at the very least know how it works. So I've been reading whatever I can get my hands on and watching stuff like Horsepower TV . But everything I read is either basic stuff, like changing your oil or really advanced stuff about engine timings and camshafts that lose me after the first paragraph.
I haven't felt so clueless since I accidently took an advanced Philosphy class in my freshman year.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
I built my first GNU/Linux PC this spring. It worked out surprisingly well. Here is my advice:
an ill wind that blows no good
Wait states have not much to do with the CPU... good advice, but a bad explanation.
:-)
True, but it is the CPU waiting. The wait states have more to do with cache misses, bus speed, and memory latency. The end result is that your CPU rarely his 100% capacity, thus real world performance differences between CPUs is somewhat mythical.
Then again, I didn't really feel like giving a dissertation on why CPU speed doesn't matter. Getting a good MoBo is about all you can do to really improve the issue. Since "quality components" was already in my advice, I figured that anyone reading it would do just fine.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
An hour or so later the noise comes back so I do the pencil trick again, but this time the buzz returns too. Thinking that maybe I should keep it stopped longer, I leave the pencil stuck between the blades. I go get a drink of water and start to feel sleepy and, forgetting about the fan, take a nap. Just as I drift off to sleep I'm woken by the loud *CRACK* of exploding electronics, and I rush in in time to see a plume of smoke rising above my deceased computer. By pure dumb luck the short hadn't spread beyond the PS and the rest of the computer survived.
7. Get an iMac! ...oh wait.
Correction: get an iBook or Powerbook. Much more portable and overall useful. PC Desktops tend to be bigger deals because everyone has to have at least one game machine/server combination. These days I see my iBook far more than I see my Desktop.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
How To Destroy Your Computer, a step by step guide.
I've never killed a mobo, but I've had one killed by a faulty power supply. One day, my computer just turns itself off. So I switch it on. It doesn't stay on for long - no, instead, there's a BzzzzzzTTT...>KAPOW!KAPOW! sound), the video card error light was on solid, and an IC on both hard drives had melted.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The dumbest thing I've ever done when upgrading my system is to use the wrong stick of RAM in my system. It was about 1mm (1/16 inch) too long for the memory socket it was supposed to fit in. So figuring it was just a tolerance issue where my sockets were just a bit too small and the memory was just a little bit too big I pulled out a knife and shaved off the PCB until the memory stick fit into the socket. It worked. For about a week then I turned on my computer one day and heard a loud !pop!. It turns out the memory was ECC (or something like that :) and my motherboard memory sockets were not. I was lucky, the only thing that happened was that that memory slot was blown completely (I tried multiple correctly sized memory modules after the fact). This was about 1998, I hope I've learned a bit more since then.
Oh yeah, my first motherboard I ruined (again while installing memory) by not knowing how to insert the memory. You're supposed to put it in at a 45 degree angle and then rotate it to the vertical position where it will lock in place. I tried to insert it straight down vertically and when it wouldn't go in applied force. The force ruined the memory slot and that motherboard didn't work at all after.
Well, I hope I've learned a few more things nowadays but I really don't build that many systems anymore - the market is so competitive nowadays that it's almost worth it to buy a prebuilt system because you get a warranty for it while being practically the same price as doing it yourself from parts.
Shh.
hehe, actually, it's using a Thermaltake Volcano 9 on it.
It has to be my case. i only have one fan in the back taking air out. and the fan that's on the power supply. But this in theory should be enough as I'm not overclocking anything. And, with the table fan off and the regular computer fans running, I'm running around 45-55c give or take. It's just that I've seen it jump for a few seconds to 60c when the CPU is really being taxed.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
That's what I ment, just it being Gentoo and everything is compiled. So while gcc is compiling firefox and it "flips a bit", that could compile an error into the firefox code, correct? Which is why I've heard many times not to be overclocking while your compiling anything.
Obviously, that is entirely different from the remote possibility of the CPU "flipping a bit" randomly when you're downloading (precompiled) stuff... exactly how? Not at all, perhaps?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
When I put together my last machine in 2000, I decided to break from the path of buying whatever shit case presented itself under 20 bucks, and spend a good chunk of change on a
It is the best piece of computer gear that I have ever bought. I expect to use this case for as long as the ATX specification is standard in mainboards. That should be your main criterion for purchasing a case- spend a good deal of money on it, because if you're posting on slashdot, you are probably enough of an enthusiast that any PC case you own will house several different boards and processors over its lifetime. This one is certain to stand up to many upgrades, and it won't annoy me by forcing my fingers into contortions or slicing them on sharp edges while I'm fixing it.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
4. Find out what every cable is *before* you plug it in. Also, make sure which direction it goes. Sometimes they need forcing, but only force after you're SURE that it's supposed to fit that way.
To add something else that I've learned about buying cables, longer cables are not always better cables. Several months ago, I went out and bought some rounded IDE cables. Because I wasn't sure exactly how long I needed them, I bought 36" cables that ended up not fitting inside my case. To this day, the extra foot of cabling is folded over and stuffed in that little space between the motherboard and the hard drive rack.
Bang. That machine never worked again.
Sounds about right for an AMD. Had the same problem with an XP 1800+. Fixed it by purchasing a P4 2.4 and new MB. For some reason, I've always experienced higer temps with AMD. AMDs fry in the lower to mid 90 degree C range. Intel slows the processor speed at around 75 degrees C. I'm not sure if it's possible to fry an P4.
Women are strange.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
I wonder if a sheet of anti-static mylar could be used as a liner between the mb and the case. Just punch a few holes where the standoffs go and at least it would protect against accidental contact.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Right, that's likely.
The Zalman heat sink, cool as it was, just didn't fit.
So, let's see. This guy got a fan too big for the case he had. Fair enough.
[Later I] bought another Zalman heat sink that looked smaller than the first.
While at the computer store, I discovered the Antec Lanboy 350. (...) I had to have that sucker!
The case I had at home was gigantic
Then, he proceeded to buy a smaller fan, which he tried to set up in A SMALLER BOX.
I ripped [the new fan] open eagerly and then realized to my utter chagrin and embarrassment that the new one didn't fit either!
I rest my case.
Sailors. Oh man!
55-62c is a little hot, but within tolerance. If it was hitting 80, you should worry. Still, you should be able to get it cooler.
I presume you've upgraded your heatsink fan, as you say you have a nice one; did you put thermal gunk on it - and did you only put a thin film, or did you ladle it? (much better to have a little than a lot). Might be worth taking it off, cleaning it carefully, and putting it back. You never know, you might just be getting poor thermal contact with the heatsink.
Also, it's generally better to have your case fans blowing hot air out the back/side, and either a fan sucking in cool air at the front, or just rely on partial pressure. Getting the hot air out is more important though. Definitely don't have the ones at the back blowing air into the case.
You could upgrade the fans on your case, if you have them blowing the right way; I've seen some cases come with really anemic fans. Make sure they're not undervolted, and running slow.
Don't forget your PSU either; you can get a decent powered PSU with an internal extract fan as well as it's external fan; I've seen that extra fan knock nearly 10 degrees off one hot case.
Finally, consider airflow again. You want cool air coming in at the front, and hot air out the sides, top, and especially the back. Make sure your cables (especially ide) are tied up neatly out the way, and aren't impeding airflow. If your fans are half decent, and your airflow unimpeded, then having the side on will actually improve airflow, and keep it cooler. You might want to drill extra holes in the sides/back though, to help hot air escape. Avoid holes on the top, they're a killer for dust.
Finally, you could always just upgrade to a better case. Two 80mm fans is entry level these days, and you can get a nice quiet case with more, or bigger fans for very little cash.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I've built a good half dozen computers over the last (good god) 15 years. This last one kicked my butt.
Never EVER go cheap on the motherboard.
Had the system up and running perfectly, plugged in the iPod a week later. zzzt. magic smoke escaped. Turned out the case wasn't providing adequate grounding/ backplane support.
Do you know how FUN it is trying to find the dead parts when you just dropped $900 on them and you DON'T have an identical system to swap parts into to check?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
"Other than me running the memory as single channel DDR instead of Dual channel for 3 months because I had it in the wrong slots. D'OH!"
:) Actually, I think it was more like 4-5 months before I realised.
Join the club, I did exactly the same
Just goes to show though, how little difference things like dual channel RAM make to those who just use their PCs for everyday gaming etc.
If the first computer you ever built had a BX chipset - then you couldn't have been "building many a PC" for too long.
We did use thermal paste. The copper plate was put above the cooler, but below the mounting piece locking the cooler to the mainbord - the only reason was to generate more pressure on the cooler....
Downloading an erroneous file would require the computer to fuck up on both the incoming packet AND the packet CRC in just the right way. I think the odds are well over 1:1 billion.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
-Lucas
You could always compile again and diff the binaries and find the bug that way, right?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Wrap it up really tightly in tinfoil too, so cosmic rays don't flip a bit. It can happen!! I'm serious. Lots of things have a non-zero probability.
I don't think you need a whole lot of pressure to get the heatsink to work, just flatness. Usually when people want their heatsink to work better they polish the bottom (until it looks like a mirror), and then use less thermal paste - as little as possible, in fact, because it doesn't conduct as well as metal (but better than air).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Water cooling isn't necessarily about better cooling, it's about noise (Like Apple's G5 case). Unless you're using a peltier, a water cooling system can only approach ambient (just like a good fan), but it's generally much quieter.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Our company makes memory chips. 80C is considered standard operating temperature. We do high voltage operating stress on the parts to eliminate infant fails at 130C before they're re-tested and sold. I'm not sure how tolerant other types of IC chips are, but 50 or 60 doesn't seem too bad yet. However, if that is 50 or 60 air temp in your case, your components are getting hotter than that, and will probably have problems.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
No, it can't.
This thread is scary dumb.
everything in moderation
Find a website for Scion tuners that has forums, and ask questions when you get stuck.
Also, if you want to get a turbocharger, read (and understand!) this book - it's really good.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I started building out computers 20 years ago when components were so #$%ing huge and cast-iron that you'd have to be a total idiot to accidentally destroy anything. By the time a faulty heat-sink could destroy a system, I had built about a hundred of them, so I've yet to destroy a single machine by my own stupidity. Knock on wood, but there is something to be said for tinkering with something you don't mind losing before dropping $2k on a soon-to-be door-stop.
Definitely, though, the huge case advice should be heeded. Sooooo many problems can arise from that, not the least of which is, ta-dah, heat dissipation. To say nothing of proper (and improper) grounding. Finally, DON'T SKIMP! You're saving money on the labor, put it into quality parts -- especially cables (power/hdd/cat5 etc). There's no sense shorting out a $200 HD or $95 power supply, and potentially a $200 MB and $400 CPU, all over a 39-cent cable that you should have spent a buck on -- (or for that matter, the $20 power supply you should have spent $50 on)... and for the love of god, don't build this thing on the floor of your shag-carpeted living room walking around in new trainers, OKAY!??!
the original comment was someone dissing Gentoo and this being one of the reasons to stay away from it. But I was commenting on compiling in general...whither you running Linux or XP or AmigaDOS or whatever.
Compiling anything anywhere. Not meaning a "binary vs. compiling" issue.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I saw 'Requiem for a Dream' today for the first time.
Great movie, but very depressing.
Yeah, so long as the binaries are compiled with the same flags, and the compiler is the same version. But then again, if I have a system producing buggy code, I wouldn't trust it to produce cross-checking code.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
One more thing, figuring out what the bug is would be insane. It would seriously be probably only one bit out of the library/executable. Making that error crop up enough so you'd even know it was a bug would be hard enough, and it would seem more like a hardware fault (which it technically is, but it's also a software fault as well).
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
So at some point my computer started emitting a irritating buzzing sound, that I finally narrowed down to the video card fan (after painstakingly unplugging EACH fan to find out).
Ok, so I hop on google and discover that these things happen and that a decent solution is to peel back a simple label that covers the axle, and drop a few drops of machine oil in. Easy enough.
So I detach the fan and start looking at it and can't really find what they are talking about, but you know, it looks like I can just pull it apart. So I try to pull it apart and it is designed sort of weird but I apply enough force and pull the bitch apart in the process breaking these little rivit thingies. Well fuck. I turn it around and discover there was the freaking label staring me in the face. I peel it back easily to expose the axle.
With that fan fucked (well, it DID actually go back on and "sorta" work), I got a new video card fan. This fan didn't fit very well because the stupid plastic pegs that attach it to the video card were too thick. So I had to get a pair of pliers and squeeze those bastards down. I finally got the new fan on the video card (in the process leaving circular indents in my thumbs and loss of sensation that lasted several DAYS). Why the hell do they not make these freaking things STANDARD SIZES for fucks sake.
Moral of the story: Build a couple of machines for geek cred but when you grow up, realize that groveling on the floor losing freaking dust speck sized screws (you do know there are 4+ types each with their own purpose and subtle difference only detectable by scanning electron microscope right?), getting cut on sharp pieces of case metal, is just Not Fucking Worth It.
Next machine I buy will probably be a name brand. After all, even if you build your own machine, you won't be able to sell it without a hassle because newbies won't freakin understand your homemade specs, but will understand a name like "Dell FooBar 2000".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Cosmic rays do have a probablility of about 1 a month or so, if you mean for one passing through a chip. However, the term 'cosmic rays' is often used to refer both to actual energetic gamma rays and to some particles, sometimes even including exotic, short lived ones like muons, so it helps to be specific.
Heavy, really energetic gamma may penetrate meters of rock, but any random gamma has a somewhat better chance of being absorbed if it's passing through someting dense, i.e. metal. To show how counter intuitive this is, a really high energy gamma ray from space, that actually hits an alumuinum nucleus in that foil, will kick off a cascade of energetic electrons and other particles, in a roughly fan shaped spray inside the case. This will be more likely to affect a data bearing structure than if that same gamma passes directly through the CPU, hits a tiny wire there, and kicks off a shower there that sprays into the plastic holder underneath instead of across the other wires inside the chip.
So, any effects from tinfoil are not particularly prone to be good, are generally unpredictable, and are outweighed by other effects, such as how your computer is oriented towards the sun and known cosmic ray sources like the crab nebula, how your location is oriented re. the van Allen belts, whether your building is steel frame construction or not, and probably a thousand other factors.
Who is John Cabal?
I've seen the [CPU] temp jump up to 61c-62c which from what I've heard is either fine to it's too hot. I've heard the gamut of people saying it's not a problem and not worry about it.
Er, why don't you do your own research? A quick google search shows that the maximum CPU temperature for XPs seems to be 85C. I believe the XPs have an on-chip temperature sensor, which should be pretty accurate. Figuring in a 15C margin-of-error, I wouldn't be concerned unless the CPU hit 65-70C on a hot day.
My first PC was a PC-1. Obsolete by the time I got it. It was ok. It was cheap.
Then I took it apart keeped a mental note of where everything belongs
(Rule 1. Keep paper notes not mental notes you forgetful twit)
After successfuly guessing where everything belonged I got my hands on an XT motherboard.
(Rule 2. Just becouse it's the same type of computer don't expect a motherboard upgrade to fit in the same old box)
I was VERY nervous about using a woden box for the case. A hack job at best but it worked out ok when I made sure the motherboard didn't touch anything metal.
(Rule 3. Paranoia is a good thing)
I got my hands on a nice XT flip top case and remebered how the old PC case was laied out.
(Rule 4. Keep notes handy.)
(Adendum: Keeping notes in your head is bad unless your memory is REALLY good.
I got lucky)
Then comes the AT motherboard.
(Rule 5. Avoid dangerous hacks and don't puch your luck. Just becouse it worked once dosen't mean you should try it again)
After getting my hands on an AT case I transfered parts to the AT.
Knowing the AT won't work on an XT powersupply prevented me from trying the woden box case a second time.
(Rule 6. Notes be dammed remember the important stuff ok? Notes are backup memory not primary memory)
Later I upgraded to a 386.
(Rule 7. You did it once you can do it again)
Then I added a VGA card but had no VGA monitor so I hacked my RGB monitor to turn it into a VGA.. kinda.
(Rule 8. Only insain morons overdrive monitors)
When it died a year later I got a real VGA.
(Rule 9. Actually get real hardware. Some hacks aren't worth the effort)
Then I started over from scratch and built a Pentium MMX 200 (this was when the fastest Intel chip was the Pentium MMX 233)
Actually no.. I got a clone chip.. Forget who made it.
(Rule 10. Research before buying.)
After buying a motherboard and Intel brand name Pentium MMX 200 to replace the now fried CPU I had kinda damaged my 20 meg hard disk.
(Rule 11. Back up everything. Always. You know this already right?)
I managed to use 15 megs of the 16 megs of ram as a ram drive and restored my backups to it.
Then I got fanatical about backups.
After all up to then I've been using Dos and restricted to 640k (except on the PC-1 where it was 512k)
(Rule 12. What can do more can do less)
Then I got a 1 gig hard disk downloaded Linux put em on floppys and installed from floppys.
(Rule 13. A bucket of used floppys is not as great as you might think)
After 2 or 3 reinstalls (due to bad floppys) I was happy and had my Linux box.
Side note: Originally the PC-1 was just a terminal for my AT&T 3b2 but the 3B2 died so I embarked on this quest to build a Linux box.
I fully intended to take it a step at a time so I didn't overwhelm myself and that worked out.
The 386 was originally planned to BE the Linux box but at the last second I changed my mind and desided if I was to build a Linux box I'd build something current.
I wasn't too thrilled with having only 3 ISA slots on my P5 but later came to be more annoyed with having only 4 PCI as I upgraded all my ISA cards.
That system has served me well but I've already obtained a new ATX case and shopping for a new AMD processor and mothrrboard.
And a video card..
And ram...
I've already replaced the hard disk.
I don't actually exist.
A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.
If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.
Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.
This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.
The book's no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you're going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.
From "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. (Chapter 24)
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
I'm interested in why everyone is jumping all over me about the CPU overheating and compiling errors? I'm only going by what I've read on other web sites about overclocking, over-heating and compiling, it's not like I'm making this stuff up. And let's face it, it's not that far fetched.
Sheesh
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
the motherboard doesnt determine how much power you draw. Obviously, what components you have does.
Especially things with motors. Harddrives, CD, DVDs. After the processor and video card, they're your largest draw.
-
Er, I did do my own research. And yes, I know about the 85c maximum temp. But I've gotten into arguments with people (wow, just like this whole thread) about CPU temps. We go "what's the temp on your CPU right now" and we go around and when I say mine is 55c I get the "thats WAY to hot! it's going to catch on fire blah blah blah". I point out to them just like you did about the 85c max temp. It goes round and round until both sides tire...kind of like how this whole thread will die too.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
"So I knocked this thingie off my car's engine - didn't bother to check what it was. It couldn't have mattered, could it?"
Yeah! Who knew that thing was so important to make the extremely complicated piece of electronic equipment work? I'll understand the other stuff, but if it's your first time putting together a system, wouldn't you be extra-careful to follow all the steps right?
Wouldn't you kill yourself if you BROKE (and that's what he's talking about: seperating a piece from the mobo that isn't meant to be seperated...) an expensive piece of equipment, and IMMEDIATELY see if you can send it in for repairs or something?
What's up with people today?
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I said "These bonds are called Ghost Bonders." Everyone referred to them as ghost bonders after that. Hah!
I see everyone bashing this guy for being an idiot, and i'm not saying you are wrong, but I'm sure everyone who has done much inside the case has had a few fuckups here and there, and we learn from them. Fortunately, the only real mistake i'v made so was was back in 1997 or so. The BIOS chip in my box went bad. I was so excited to finally have the replacement so I could my computer back after having no internet access while the damn thing was being shipped for a week that i actually put it in backwards. After firing it up and hearing the bad bios beeps that I'd been getting all along, I was really dissapointed, and immediately smelled somthing burning. After burning my fingers pulling the chip back out, I realized my mistake and put it back in the right way. Incredibly I saved it in time, and the box actually still works. I now use that box just to play with the hardware and get a feel for removing/replacing/examining parts, so if i do bust somthing, its just on a worthless pentium 75 that I don't actually use anymore. Of corse most of the sockets and everything are different now, and the processor doesn't even have a fan, just a heatsink, but it helps to have somthing you woulden't care if you broke to experiment on. I don't know if this guy has an excuse since he appears to be a professional tech writer, but we were all noobs once. "Don't poke around inside your case unless you know what you are doing" doesn't fly, because the people who are saying this didn't know what they were doing once. Learn from your mistakes, and this guy's.
...I once had "LM7805" branded backwards on my fingertip, by seeing 'What is hot in here?" ..But that wasn't nearly as bad as the other tech who ran his finger across the inkjet printer head while it was printing. (They design them so you can't do that anymore)( without major effort)
The ink almost made him have to have his finger amputated; It is very toxic, injected under the skin like that.
You could clearly read "The quick brow" backwards, fairly distorted, across the tip of his index finger, afew days later, after all the swelling went down.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Unfortunately, a lot of cases have decorative plastic front bezels that don't let air thru, even though they seem to have a grill in the front.
On all my cases, I use a 7" diameter AC fan on the front. I cut a hole thru the plastic bezel, thru the sheetmetal, and mount a 240 volt AC 7" (6.75") diameter fan on the front, blowing in so as not to fight with the power supply fan.
Using a 240 volt fan on a 120 volt system makes it run slow so it is not noisy. You could also use a 120 volt fan and a speed control suitable for inductive loads ( a light dimmer usually isn't). The ideal is to use a 200 volt fan made for the Japanese market (where the voltage is 100 or 200 volts, vs the 120/240 in the USA) but these are a little hard to find.
You absolutely need to have outlet area to dump the hot air, and I try to put my cards in every other pci slot, and leave out the blanks covering the slots in between. In this way you make a card cage like in the mainframes, where air used to flow between every board.
The fans are cheap on the surplus market, if you check the ads in Nuts and Volts magazine, you will find lots of surplus places listed. If you get a used fan and it has noisy bearings, you can pull them, read the part numbers, and order replacements for them from a bearing place like E. B. Atmus.
Once you make the proper holes in your case and put in a big fan, you should get lower temps than you do with the cover off.
If you want to be less extreme you can use smaller 12 volt fans, just make sure you cut the holes to let air in and out.
Here are some cheap fans at marlin p jones. The 24 volt fans may not run at all on 12 volts, unfortunately, but the 12 volt ones should run on the 7 volts you get between +12V and +5V on your power supply.
Good luck!
I dunno. The las several girls I've dated would get more fustrated at a game watching it than I was playing it. Then I'd be like "let's go to a movie or something" the words "But...yer not done with the level" came out of their mouth.
Too bad I couldn't stand any of them. Strippers are crazy....
It's a trick....get an axe.
This this the right way to build a system.
1. Research, research, research. Read, ask questions, and look at systems that work.
2. Follow directions, my P41 Fire Dragon main board came with a 150 page manual and is very detailed.
3. Don't even think about forgetting about the anti-static protocols.
4. Get the right parts the first time around, I waited 3 weeks to get all my parts together.
5. Burn that bad boy in, run the machine 24/7 for 5 days after you have determined that it runs right. If there is any problem with the machine, such as over heating, return the offending part(s) for replacement or refund. To do otherwise may void any warranties.
This is as true today as it was 50 years ago. Furthermore, I think if you can't name "major" components on a motherboard, you shouldn't be messing with it - or at the very least, you should know this and *really* take your time.
I remember upgrading the memory, as a kid, in my TRS-80 Color Computer 3, from 128K to a whopping 512K. This was about 15 years ago. I remember the instructions (which I still have, along with the computer, and upgrade - and yes, it still runs great!) warning about handling the CMOS devices to avoid static electricity (when inserting each of the DRAM chips into their sockets). I ended up grounding myself using a length of steel wire tied to the kitchen faucet, then looped around my arm as I did the upgrade.
All in all, it took me about an hour to perform that first true "upgrade" on my Color Computer - being a 15 year old kid, impatient to get my upgrade going, but knowing that if I screwed up, my parents would be pissed (they paid for it, after all) - I took my time, grounded myself, and made sure I did everything right. So what do I have to show for it?
Well, patience, number one - but I also can still whip out my Color Computer 3, with floppy drive, monitor, and 512K of RAM - and boot it into OS-9 (8 bit multiuser/multitasking, baby!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Some chips can be destroyed if the power supply does not apply or remove the various voltages in the correct order. Usually there is some circuitry in the power supply to sequence things correctly and to shut down all voltages if any problems are detected. The power supply could damage the motherboard if it did not shut down properly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The only problem I had that was really unexpected and devastating was when I touched the thermal tape to the CPU core more than once. In other words, thermal tape is only good on the first application. If you move it around, take it on and off, trying to double-check your work, to see if the heatsink is on there properly, you kill the thermal tape. You have once chance with the thermal tape to put that on properly, and if you remove the heatsink after the tape has touched the CPU, it's no good anymore.
Anyway, at the time the Duron 750 was like a $30.00 part, and memory was incredibly cheap and getting cheaper, so a new stick of RAM and a new Duron 750, a Thermaltake vacuum cleaner and some thermal grease, and everything was back to normal.
It's been since upgraded to an XP 1700+, so that's pretty nice. Still works well, solid, reliable, weeks-of-uptime BSD machine.
Careful with that thermal tape!
You've obviously never used an iBook or Powerbook. I swear those things are indestructable. At the very least, they'll live their 3 year lifetime without complaint. I should know, my youngest son has ripped it off my desk (bending the power connector!) three times, and I've dropped it at least twice. (damn cables...) Save for having to replace the power cord a few times, it's as good as new.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
God bless 'em, we need more people like this to help rejuvinate the economy!
Cold items cause moisture to condense. Moisture adn electricity don't mix. Always let all electronics warm up to room temperature before plugging them in.
Just to make sure... The fan on the power supply is cranking air out the back, right? It used to be that most power supplies went the opposite way, and it was a meaningful 'mod' to crack open your power case and turn the fan around...though most ps's I've seen recently do have it pointed the correct way...
Sig currently under construction. Mind the gap....
Here's a bad mistake. NEVER work on a computer while sweating profusly 8-( I think it was July 4 years ago, got the case open on its side, had to be 95 degrees out that night. One drip of sweat started to fall down my nose, DRIP, tried to catch it with my hand... Dang, missed it. Right on to the leads on my MB's intergrated 7890. Whatched helplessly as I watched the salty fluid wick under the chip. Bye bye SCSI. Got some distilled water.Driped with an eyedroper from the other side, with a wad o paper towels on the sweaty side to try to geet the salt out from under the chip. Followed up with Denatured alcohol. Then acetone to get the last of the H20. Oh how i hoped i got all of the salts and moisture out from under that chip. Waited servral days. Heated area of the chip with hair drier every day. Finally powered the beast back up. Nope, right the first time... Bye Bye SCSI I'm just glad I never did this at work repairing old 1970's hand laid circuit boards. some of the ones in my old machines cost $6000+ apiece used in 1995. Beautiful hand laid Gold wire boards, Also high voltage 680 Vac stuff.(its complicated.. shop had triple phase 380, machine wanted 500 VAC internaly, steped up to 680 routed through one or two boards then back down to 500 to the machine tool, I think, but i've slept since then) (industrial Wire EDM equiptment one had serial # 0002, Yep sill prototype. Always stumped the Techs from the manufactuer)
Last year I got a good deal on about a thousand Asus motherboards. I sold all of them on ebay and pretty much figured that I would have quite a few returned because the buyer damaged it and claimed it was broken. Suprisingly, only about half a dozen got returned and of those 4 actually worked and were resold. Of the two others, one had a mark where the screwdriver had slipped and damaged the PCB and the other had a heatsink fall off the bridge.
Of course maybe a lot of people broke the boards and never returned them, or perhaps sent them to Asus for repair instead of back to me for a refund. But I was still amazed at the low return rate and have to conclude that the buyers were smarter than I gave them credit for. Or maybe it was the line in my auctions that said "NO IDIOTS". Hard to say.
What I can say for sure is that they were all smarter than the extremetech writer.
It disintegrates.
I've seen the powder residue.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
That is definably KIY (Kill It Yourself). A white doo-hickey? Alright, I am not going to say that I have never done stupid, irrational and down right non-sensical things while working on hardware, however if I knock something off the mobo, "a doo-hickey" if you will, I will not be suprised when it doesn't boot.
Wow, next time perhaps this guy should just pay someone to do his work for him. That or practice on old 286/386's till you know better what you are doing. Expensive lesson, I hope he learned from it.
Patience is indeed a virtue!
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Hi,
2 possibilities:
A) You used a heatsink with that pink gum like substance. Remove that and use some Artic silver heatsink compound.
B) You did A as advised, but you used the whole tube of Artic silver compound, clean that off and use just a tiny BB sized dab of it.
When building systems, I observed that the pink bubble gum stuff caused AMD 2xxxx series to run hot. Scraping that off and using tubed compound would get the temps back down around 45c instead of 58c.
They Live, We Sleep
I wouldn't take it personally... I think the consensus seems to be that the event you describe, while possible, is so unlikely as to be statistically insignificant. I don't think that's any reason to jump all over you and describe the thread as 'scary dumb', an epithet more than slightly ironic, but that's Slashdot for you I'm afraid. The only pleasure some people get is humiliating others... it's sad, really!
Cheers, and good luck with the cooling!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Usually when people want their heatsink to work better they polish the bottom (until it looks like a mirror)
Think that's "lapping"...
But you are correct about how much paste to use. Like the old commercial said, "a little dab 'll do you". The goal of the paste is to fill in any microscopic holes in the heatsink/CPU as it conducts heat better then air. Even the fancy "artic silver" pastes don't conduct heat as well as direct metal-to-chip contact.
The proper amount of paste is a thin sheen, usually by dabbing a tiny dot on the CPU and use a credit card edge to spread it.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Standard commercial grade chips are rated to operate at 0 to 70c. Industrial grade ICs are usually rated for -40 to +85. Military (sometimes extended industrial) ICs are rated for -55 to +125. Most automotive modules are designed to operate safely over the industrial range; underhood modules are designed for an even larger range, and a small subset of powertrain modules (the ones designed to sit in hot fluids) are designed for ridiculous ranges including temperatures of a couple hundred C.
Those are all ambient air temperatures; I don't know the junction/chip temps for commercial or military but most industrial ICs are rated for 125 or 150C at the junction.
Chips are not your main worry, usually - worry about moving parts, especially HDDs, which are significantly affected by heat.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Since you mentioned CompUSA...
http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=compusa_sucks
Actually, it will shutdown if your BIOS supports ACPI; most do these days. ...) helps you control the temperature in your machine, and you really don't have to do anything. The kernel handles it all.
Compiling ACPI-support in the kernel (inlucing thermal zones, fan
I found out the hard way, and learned something by it, wondering why my laptop would keep overheating and hence shutting down, and this ever since trying the kernel 2.6.x. Stupid kernel configuration choices where the culprit.
But I've seen everything from "60c isn't bad" to "60c is one step below the entire computer bursting into flames".
Different CPUs are capable of different temperatures. (case in point: Intell Prescott chips being derided as "Pres*hot*" chips)
Internal case temp should be in the 30-45C range (assuming ambient air temp of around 25C). My AMD cases are running 41-46C at the moment, but the A/C is off and the ambient temp in here is 31C. CPU temps are generally in the 50s, depending on the case temp and the particular chip. I only use AMD, but I get nervous when the chip hits the high 50s. At which point, I investigate larger heatsinks or higher cfm fans.
Only solutions for lowering internal case temps are either:
- Remove heat-generating components
- Get components that produce less heat (5400rpm drives instead of 7200rpm drives, older video cards instead of the dual-heater top-of-the-line beast, use an older and cooler CPU)
- Adjust/add fans to move more air through the case per minute (air flow). Make sure the exhaust fans are properly oriented so that air flows through the case as designed.
- Simply buy a larger case so that the heat producing components are farther away from each other (Antec Sonata / p160 or a full-tower case)
- If the video card has a fan on it, make sure there is at least one empty slot between it and the closest PCI card
- 7200+ rpm drives generally require active cooling (Antec p160/Sonata cases have drive bays with a dedicated 120mm fan slot). Putting a 7200rpm drive in an external USB/firewire enclosure that doesn't have a fan is a good way to kill the drive (been there, done that, now only use 5400rpm drives in those enclosures).
I tend to be conservative with my cooling advice because my office has poor climate control. Like I said, it's 31C in here at the moment, which is warm enough to be uncomfortable even in shorts and a t-shirt. However, all of my machines work just fine since that they're in good cases with good airflow.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Just goes to show though, how little difference things like dual channel RAM make to those who just use their PCs for everyday gaming etc.
And on the AMD boards, it doesn't make much of a difference to performance. (Usual amount bandied about is only 5-10% better.)
Yeah, it's sexy, but at least with the first generation boards (A7N8X) it's more of a marketing point. I've tested with MemTest86 (which shows data rates while testing the memory), PCMark2002, and the data rates shown by QuickPar when creating a PAR2 file set.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I work at a PC retail shop. I just want to agree with you strongly. If anything goes wrong, the guys at the internet site will not help you. If you buy half your stuff from another store, we will blame thier hardware.
OTOH, if you just get a bunch of stuff from us, we'll take care of you. We have to deal with you face to face, so it isn't worth the hassle to screw you over.
Another reccomendation : here in Denver we have a guy named Tom Martino, "The Troubleshooter." He's on the local news show, and he does stories about crappy businesses. Know the name of whatever similar reporter exists in your municipality. If the guys at your local shop are giving you shit, don't be afraid to give them shit.
Be reasonable with the guys at the shop. Give them a chance to take care of you of something is wrong. And shit does go wrong. Don't be real surprised if you get a bad stick of RAM, or whatever. That isn't what makes somebody shady. IT's what happens next! If you inform them they gave you a shitty piece of RAM, and they tell you to go fuck yourself, it isn't right. Also, make sure you know the warranty information upfront. If you are at five times the warranty period, and expectiung a full refund, you are SOL. If you are three days past the warranty period, they should be willing to take care of you.
Last word of advice when dealing with a shop : sometimes they will only warranty a part if they install it. Don't get your panties in a knot. Some people are as incompetant ast the author of the article, so the shop doesn't want to deal with warranty replacement of backward-inserted DIMMs. They aren't calling you stupid, it just makes things easier for anybody.
Install Windows.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Geez. I just thought I'd share my experience. You don't have to click to read it you know. LOL
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
If a sudden loss of power to the ps causes a mb to fry in any consumer PC then, IMHO, somthing is defective, possibly the ps. It shouldn't happen period. Power outages are to likely in typical home or small bussiness to guarantee it'll never go out suddenly.
Turning of a switched outlet is no worse, and often better, that a random outage.
I've been through lots of outages, and even had my comp connected to switched outlet someone (ok,ok, me somtimes) would turn off without making shure the comp was powered down. NEVER have I had that dammage anything more than data on the hd.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I've never been to ExtremeTech.com, but I would guess by the name of the site and the writer's completely ridiculous mistakes, that this article has to be a joke. I could understand if this was some random blog, but this article is coming from a site that seems to be about upgrades/mods/etc. Did they decide to get the mailroom guy to build a PC? It just doesn't make much sense.
As quite a few other posters have pointed out their tips for building a new system, all I really want to add in is RTFM. I'm not saying you have to read the entire thing, but everytime I've built a new system, that's my method. Open the box, ogle the motherboard, then take 5 minutes to look over the manual--that way you at least know the random jumpers on the board. And it gives you a moment to step back from it and calm down--at least for me. If I'm about to be building a new PC, I'm raring to go. I think the key to building a system is to SLOW DOWN! Think before you ram that $300 CPU in the wrong way and bend all the pins.
That's just my advice.
Faulty power supplies are responsible for a LOT of problems, most people blame half of them on the software or other components and never think to check the ps. I've solved more than a few issues with new power suplies.
Probably somthing got damaged by the old one and finally died when a borderline component couldn't take one more power cycle.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Thanks for the warmth, my friend. LOL
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
Thankfully my editor has a better sense of humor than you, apparently. ;-)
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
Maybe I'm stupid, but what the fuck?
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Thanks for the positive feedback and support. You're a good egg. :-)
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
Hey, fark you man. ;-)
Jim Lynch
Tech Analyst and Community Manager
In the midwest local computer stores died along time ago. Its pretty much bigbox (compusa, bestbuy, circuit city) or internet.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Indeed it can.
Once upon a time I installed an operating system on a desktop computer with NO connection to any network. I wrote the root password down in a sooper-sekrit place. I used the machine and the root password successfully for three days. The password was hard-to-remember, and I consulted the note several times over those days. On the forth day, the root password would no longer be accepted. I spent much of the forth day trying and retrying the password, using the same keyboard, different keyboards, and getting other people to try to type the password in, just to take myself out of the equation.
Nothing worked. Impossibly, the password had been changed. On the fifth day, I reinstalled the operating system.
At the time, I lived alone. No one else had access to this machine until I asked folks to try to type the pswd. The only possible explanation I could come up with was that a cosmic ray had hit the hard disk and twiddled a bit in the password file, changing it from the password I had set, written down, and used successfully.
Anyone else have an alternate explanation or a similar tale? I'd love to hear them.
Yeah, I didn't feel like using jargon.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From the rest of the article it is apparent he is a beginner at case mods. So by the time we read about how much he likes the case window for viewing we understand why he doesn't have a webcam inside his case.
Just trying to identify my three 'worst moments with electronics', seems like there are more than I can go into... 1. Learning about the magic smoke that lives in integrated circuits while miss wiring a bread board in electronics lab. 2. Realizing that the FMU 113b that I just pulled out of an alcohol tank still had the detonator in it. 3. 'Discovering' that the fan in the powersupply of my daughters recently upgraded PC had failed by frying my hand on the top of the case. Luckily, all situations were survivable and cost me nothing more than an elevated heart rate ;)
Wherever You Go, There You Are
author takes idioting seriously... Before reading the article I expected he destroyed his hardware with *style*, but he did not. I knew one guy who screwed motherboard directly to metal plate of computer case, without spacers. Motherboard circuits were shorted out and the mobo was gone. Unfortunately I never experienced to burn motherboard or processor.. once I was sure I have fried my old Duron 800 MHz - cpu fan fell off, fan-holding brackets on cpu socket were too weared. Motherboard overheat protection shutted all down and after some time this system went back to life. And I've managed how to *nail* cpu fan to motherboard. There's some leak from condensers, it looks like they're about to explode however system still works (ECS K7VZA rev.1.0 mobo).
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
Thanks. Nice idea. Will try that.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
At least if you want a good computer rather than just doing it once out of curiosity. Every time I tried, I ended with mysterious lockups, resets and random failures to boot when powered on. I have a suspition that various components do not implement standards precisely and some combinations are more reliable than others, for example a video card might have problems with a particular motherboard. In this case, big PC makers would have a chance to discover the problems and substitute components. For home made PC - good luck finding which part to exchange and getting the store to believe you didn't damage it yourself.
Thats fun. A friend of mine did that with a mainboard (w/486/DX66+3 PCI!) of ME! He is still a friend, though. :)
:)
He stuck the chip in the socket and I reckoned he did it correctly, as that is his job. I reckoned incorrectly. EPROMS have a tiny little window where you can direct ultraviolet radiation inside to erase the content. A bright flash of radiation came from INSIDE the chip when I turned the system on. I knew instantly that this was not a good sign.
The chip was fried and I had no BIOS Backup. I wrote emails all over the world but could not find the manufacturer. The funny thing of the story is that if I had remembered the BIOS-ID string which is on the screen when the system boots, Award could have told me the manufacturer.
No BIOS, no bootup, no BIOS-ID, no Manufacturer, no image. Damn.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
...its funny. :)
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
athlon 2500? dual channel ram? if this is an nforce2 board, then bear in mind a lot of early bioses misreported temperature. bios flash to the latest version and check before you panic: up to 15 degree drops seen on some MSI boards. ric
So, while I can't lay claim to the stupidity that caused my most interesting hardware failure I still laugh every time that I think about it, so here goes nothing interesting:
One day I am sitting at my computer, minding my own business trying desperately to finish a contract job that I have to deliver in about 12 hours. I haven't showered for two days, slept in about three or really had a meal that didn't involve junk food or cup o' noodles at the computer all week. I am almost done, I can feel it, so I stand up and go into the other room to call into the office and make sure nothing else has gone wrong while I have been dealing with this.
As I stand up, my cat assumes that I am going to pet him, and I have to gently remind him (read: shove him away) that there are other things that I have to do. So, I go into the other room and make a phone call. I am on the phone for about five minutes and everything is grand. I walk back into the room and go to sit down at my computer and notice several things wrong, listed in the order in which I noticed them:
1) My computer was off.
2) My computer was smoking
3) My computer smelled like cat urine
4) My cat was angry
Apparently when I refused to pet my cat, he decided to get back at my by marking the object that I was ignoring him in favor of: my computer. I, like the tower of intellect that I can be, had that side off of my case and a big house fan blowing in the side due to air flow problems at my, then, over-clocked system.
Well, enough to say that the computer didn't work, the job didn't get finished that day and the cat has never been the same. He won't go near computers anymore.
(I do have to say that this experience is the reason that I don't mind hearing the 'Jesus Saves' joke anymore because if it wasn't for that lame-ass joke I wouldn't have remembered to save my work and I would have been out a contract and not just 14 hours late with a great story to tell.)
Hit the nail on the head! Yes, I have an nforce2 board, but I haven't flashed the bios to the latest version.
I'll try that out, thanks.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
[hoping for negative answers]
BTW, you don't drive, do you? Maintain your own vehicle? Take flying lessons?!?
[/hope]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Reading some of the nasty comments here on /. actually makes me feel sorry for the ExtremeTech guy. Ok so he made a couple of noob DIY mistakes, but who doesn't? Hopefully by the time he builds the next PC it should be easier... if he is smart to remember the mistakes he did.
OTH there are people who are just too hamfisted to be successful at handling/building delicate electronic components. I remember a manager I had once who kept on breaking stuff that we were building software for, almost everytime he "played" with one of them...
I used to work as a tech at Best Buy - I SWEAR TO GOD, one time I had an IDE cable where the filled in hole was on the bottom instead of the top.
No, you can't just flip it over - there's an extra 'chunk' of plastic on top to be extra sure you get it in right. Fortunately, I haven't seen another one of those in the 10 years since then..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I read the whole article, and was LOL. I've got to admit he's a pretty good writer. I really thought the article was hilarious. I used to do helpdesk stuff, and it just really seems to me that non-tech people are just afraid to do anything other than their tasks. I had one guy ask me "how do I create a new folder on my desktop" in windows, he was the VP of Sales. Then there was the time I had to go out to one of our distributors and consult with their "tech guy" on a problem with the printer not printing. He told me had it plugged in and everything, yeah plugged in the wall, luckily I had a spare printer cable with me.
A few suggestions:
How Stuff Works has a good section on auto technology explaining the basics.
There are tech talk discussion forums where you can ask questions at many magazine websites. My current favorite is the 'Combustion Chamber' at Auto Week, and aside from the registration it is free. (If you find anything better, please let me know.)
One thing to remember about Horsepower TV is that they focus on a lot of muscle cars with pushrod engines. I personally am a big fan of pushrod engines (there are lots of pushrod vs. over head camshaft discussions on various forums), but the valvetrain layout is different enough from overhead cams that you can get confused comparing the two.
A lot of the hot rod magazines have free tech articles that give explanations on the magazine website.
To get a car that handles superbly around curves, the traditional requirement is either rear wheel drive with LSD (That's Limited Slip Differential, not the drug) or else all wheel drive. Giving the Scion either would probably cost more than selling it and replacing it with a car that already has one of those setups, like a Lexus IS 300.
I don't mean to discourage you. With the right modifications almost any front wheel drive car can be blazingly fast in a straight line and respectably quick around curves. But making a tC keep pace with, say, a $23,000 Subaru WRX on a twisty road course would be a real challenge.
We'll I built my first two machines for work a while back. They are both Athlon64 3200 systems on a MSI motherboard in a Antec Sonata case the first one has a CPU temp of 52C and a SYS temp of 35C. The second one I did a better job of seating the CPU and routing te cables and get a CPU temp in the high 30's. This is with a stock AMD cooler and the extra 120mm case fan. The hardest part was getting the RAID set up for the 2 Raptors in RAID 0. I used the Promise controller on the MoBo instead of the VIA. They are CAD systems so i wanted the hard drive speed over reliabilty.
It was a first time build and it didn't take much longer than buying a Dell and removing all of their crap and installing my stuff and i got what I wanted like a floppy drive card reader combo and a daul DVI card that didn't cost an arm and a leg.
You might want to worry about solar flares as well. The best solution? Wrap your hard drive in magnets. They hate that.
It's been a long time.
That was just too damn funny. I'd mod you up, but I'm fresh out.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
I dunno, building a computer is really kind of easy.
:)
Steps:
Decide on a processor family: AMD or Intel.
Decide on a motherboard: Compatible with processor, has the desired motherboard connections - usb, ieee1394, sound, gigalan, Dual Channel DDR, memory capacity, SATA, SPDIF etc...
Decide on amount of memory: Dual DDR 512 - 1GB min.
Decide on the video card: Nvidia or ATI - how much you got to spend?
Buy your drives: No less than 200GB HD, DVDRW and CDRom drives.
Decide on Operating System: Linux of course - Gentoo.
And, last but not least...
RTFM!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.