History

Being that I'm a computer geek, I figured I should post some info about some of the things I've written and what I've done with my PCs.

October 25, 2002

I've got PICTURES!

October 11, 2002

Did I crush my CPU? We may never know. By this time I would have exposed it to enough static to fry it either way. I got an Athlon XP 1600+ from a friend for $50. I put that in and my computer still didn't work. In fact it wouldn't do anything. So I thought there was a problem with my power supply. I pulled everything apart except the power supply and motherboard and thought I would give it one last try. It worked! So I put everything back together one piece at a time and it's fine. I don't know what the problem was. Well, at least I've ended up with an upgrade after all this.

Only problem is that the XP 1600+ runs warmer than the Duron did. Not surprisingly. But I have to crank my CPU fan up pretty high to keep it under 120 degrees. It's kinda noisy. I don't like that. I always thought that if I did upgrade that I would underclock it a bit. Unfortunately to do that I'd have to unlock the CPU which requires taking it out and doing some things to it. I don't want to take the chance of messing things up again. So we'll see. At least I was able to turn the core voltage down from 1.75V to 1.65V. That seems to have helped keep it a little bit cooler.

September 30, 2002

CRAP! I crushed my CPU this weekend. That'll learn me to take the heat sink on and off too many times. It seemed like my CPU was running a little bit hotter than it should. I ended up taking off the heat sink after I couldn't get the chipset heat sink in with it in the way. I never re-applied any thermal paste. So I thought maybe I should put more on. But as I was putting the heat sink back on I was having trouble getting the thing to latch on. It worked fine at first as I entered the CMOS setup to check the temps. But then I rebooted and the thing beeps at me and I get nothing. I finally took the heat sink off again after not being able to figure out what the problem was when I noticed some black on the heat sink. I look at the CPU and notice that the corners are chipped up a bit.

Well, at the least this is an excuse to upgrade to an Athlon XP 1600+.

September 26, 2002

This past weekend I finally finished painting my PC. I took some pictures but have to finish the roll before I can post them. It's mostly red with the drives being black and most of the buttons are silver. I also drilled a few holes at the bottom front of the case. There's a fan there but no place for air to get thru. I also picked up a ThermalTake Volcano 9 heatsink and fan for the CPU plus a Zalman ZM-NB32J heatsink for the chipset. I like the Volcano 9 'cuz it has an adjustable fan control. Currently I have it at 3000rpm but it seems to be getting a bit too hot. So I may have to turn it up a little more. But it is quieter then it was before. And the noise is softer so that's a good thing.

July 30, 2002

I finally picked up a CD-RW for my PC. Tiger Direct has a deal on the Artec 24x10x40 for $50 plus a $20 rebate. I couldn't turn it down. But something funny happened after I installed it. I installed the Nero software that came with it. There is a part in the configuration that tests transfer rates of each drive. Well, I noticed that my 7200rpm SCSI Ultra Wide drive was only hitting about 15MB/s. My IDE 5400rpm ATA-100 drive hit about 35MB/s. This doesn't make much sense to me. Now I realize that the SCSI-UW should be maxed out at 40MB/s where as the ATA should be able to reach 100MB/s. But in either case, the drive speed should be the bottleneck here. So the 7200rpm should be faster than the 5400rpm. Maybe I'm missing a setting or something.

Well, the other thing I thought about was that the IDE is much quieter than the SCSI drive. Partly due to the slower spindle speed. Plus it's a lot cooler. So I'm thinking about ditching the SCSI drive. Last night I had the PC running all night with the SCSI drive disconnected and I couldn't barely hear the thing over the fan that we turn on at night. So it's pretty quiet. I like that. Then maybe I'll throw the SCSI drive in my Linux box.