(no subject)
I guess since Sheila is making such a fuss in the comments of the last entry, I ought to update this thing. It's not going to be pretty, and it's going to be even less interesting, but I'm doing it for you.
So I've been having to muck around inside my computer constantly for the past few weeks. It was either last month or the month before that I'd been hearing odd noises. Not fan noises, considering these shitty, barely aligned, pre-gummed hard drive fans I keep putting in have me used to fans grinding and halting, but something a bit more unsettling. Rather stupidly, I let it slide for a few weeks, but eventually it got to the point where I decided to drag the system out, open it up, and see what was making the noise. Yep, it was my old 60 GB drive. I decided I was going to burn off all the stuff that would be difficult or time consuming to replace, freed up about 30 GB, and kept going with it; because y'know, noise schmoise, a little grinding and squealing never hurt anyone - barring certain Japanese sex videos, that is. Sure enough, the very next day, the drive died. Talk about lucky. Sometimes I wonder if my luck with my own computer is compensation for the amount of hair-pulling frustration I get myself into with others' computers, or maybe it's just some kind of neuro-mechanical link I have with my computer and I'm living some sort of thoroughly underwhelming cyberpunk novel. Yeah, tapping into atmospheric harmonics and becoming one with the Wired and all that, except instead of intrigues and the Knights sabotaging my Amiga 3000 and mind-fucks all around, the only notice anyone takes is "Oh it's just that ridiculous asshole in my computer again".
Anyway, this week, due to the confounding rarity of Socket 478 motherboards - that's the standard Pentium 4 motherboard - I had to replace this guy's cooked motherboard with one of our own. The one we took it from was this Vista test box I had assembled a while back, and when all was said and done we had a spare 3.0 GHz P4 CPU lying around. So I called dibs, and even though I have no actual need for more power - my PC was absurdly fast, did everything I wanted it to, and it did it quickly; the only thing I really couldn't do was play recent games all that well, but that's more the fault of my video card, and to be honest I'd rather play my DS or Sega Saturn. It's not like I'm going to turn down the chance to upgrade, though.
So I put the chip in my computer, everything seems to be working just fine, I'm running some h264 fansubs and Ninja Terminator and a few console emulators all at once and everything's running just peachy keen, but I'm getting weird noises from the fan, and a strange beeping I'd never heard before. Now, I'm not a big fan of my computer making noises I haven't heard before. It's like your heart skipping beats - well, not quite, of course, I'd be dead if my heart stopped, and I'd just be out a whole lot of fansubs and pornography if my computer ate shit.
It was the heat sensor. I've never actually worried about heat. Pentium 4s run hot, very hot, which is why you attach a giant hunk of aluminium and a huge unwieldy fan on top of it. But heat isn't good, heat is the computer killer, and now that I was notified about it, and that my computer had never cracked the 80 degree point but was now giving me guff whenever I did anything remotely processor intensive, I was a bit wound up. I put my 2.4 back in, and noticed that one was getting close to cracking 80 as well. It was something I never worried about before, but now I was totally on edge and looking for anything at all to make it just a little bit cooler.
Now, I'm reasonably good with computers. I should be, it's my job, more-or-less. That is, I'm at least comfortable with them, and I'm not afraid of breaking them, and basically know where everything goes and what it needs to go in. Yet, I'm deficient in my knowledge in a lot of ways - I've been a lazy bastard about teaching myself, just choosing to learn everything on-the-job, though I've been finally starting to do some self-study. Sometimes I don't know as much about specifics as I should. One of those specifics was the model of my processor. I had thought my processor was a P4 Prescott - The Prescott model runs way, way, way hotter than anything else, tending to just barely stay below the throttling line, the line where the processor actually starts to slow down because it's getting too hot. I'm talking to someone, he seems to think it's a Northwood - Northwoods, by comparison, run twenty or thirty degrees cooler as a rule. I look it up, hey, I guess Prescotts started at 2.8 GHz or something? (SECRET HINT FROM THE PROS: don't always trust the Wikipedia) I'm only running a 2.4? Well, then I guess I'm running a Northwood here! One running absurdly hot! I'm thinking something's fucking up really badly and search for anything to reduce the heat a bit, weird fan/scoop combinations and thinking about buying expensive heatsinks and all that, when I finally get the inkling in my dinosaur skull that "Hey, maybe I should actually check the model number on my CPU to make sure it's a Northwood!". Sure enough, it was a Prescott, there were 2.4 Prescotts, I'm running a bit hot and did wind up putting an outflow fan in my case (to which one of the people I was talking to on IRC responded "You hadn't done that already?"), but was generally within acceptable heat parameters. Plunked the 3.0 in again, turned off the heat alarm, and everything is running just fine.
Well, until the next day when I start smelling burning wire - It's a smell which anyone who understands anything about electronics knows and has nightmares on a regular basis about - and frantically ripped it open again and found that shitty hard drive fan I had put on my 320 GB main drive was basically melting. So that was easy to fix. The rule is that $5 hard drive fans probably aren't worth the trouble. The damned thing probably generated more heat than it dispersed; I'm very likely better off just barebacking it like I am now.
Oh, I also wound up getting a new 250 GB drive to replace my 60 GB drive, and once again I didn't have the slightest need for it. With my 60 gone, I had... a 320, a 160, and a 100 left. I had well over 100 GB free; hell, I've got an empty 20 GB partition lying fallow that I had planned on sticking the Vista pre-release or Linux or something on that I haven't bothered with because LAZY, and with actually burning off some of the crust that's been accumulating in my /downloads/ directories, I probably could have freed up another fifty or sixty gigabytes. Back in the old days, I was always running on margins of single megabytes; hell, kilobytes. When decent video codecs and MP3 came along, I was still basically having to run my computer completely bereft of anything aside from a few vital tools and a couple dozen console ROMs just so I could watch some movies and listen to some music music. And back in the days when Neo Geo emulation was the big thing, I had to crank the amount of virtual memory I was running up into the hundreds of megabytes so that I could run King of Fighters '98 on my modest 48 megs of RAM, thus squeezing my two gigabytes of hard drive space even thinner. But no, I guess I've become so averse to disk management in these heady days of ludicrously cheap memory, that instead of watching my hard drive space creep into the double digits (or would that be undecal digits?), I'd rather just spend the $90 for another two-hundred-and-fifty-billion bytes, and use that space that could very likely hold the entirety of humanity's written culture for... more fansubs and porn. Technology truly has enriched our lives, hasn't it?
Oh yeah, Yotsuba&! Volume 4 is FINALLY coming out over here. Though I've already read everything in it, both fan-translated and stumble-through-half-understanding-with-JWPCE-open-in-the-background raw, I'm still excited as hell and think we should all buy it. Also you should dance, too, because I think this is certainly worth dancing over. Yes.
So I've been having to muck around inside my computer constantly for the past few weeks. It was either last month or the month before that I'd been hearing odd noises. Not fan noises, considering these shitty, barely aligned, pre-gummed hard drive fans I keep putting in have me used to fans grinding and halting, but something a bit more unsettling. Rather stupidly, I let it slide for a few weeks, but eventually it got to the point where I decided to drag the system out, open it up, and see what was making the noise. Yep, it was my old 60 GB drive. I decided I was going to burn off all the stuff that would be difficult or time consuming to replace, freed up about 30 GB, and kept going with it; because y'know, noise schmoise, a little grinding and squealing never hurt anyone - barring certain Japanese sex videos, that is. Sure enough, the very next day, the drive died. Talk about lucky. Sometimes I wonder if my luck with my own computer is compensation for the amount of hair-pulling frustration I get myself into with others' computers, or maybe it's just some kind of neuro-mechanical link I have with my computer and I'm living some sort of thoroughly underwhelming cyberpunk novel. Yeah, tapping into atmospheric harmonics and becoming one with the Wired and all that, except instead of intrigues and the Knights sabotaging my Amiga 3000 and mind-fucks all around, the only notice anyone takes is "Oh it's just that ridiculous asshole in my computer again".
Anyway, this week, due to the confounding rarity of Socket 478 motherboards - that's the standard Pentium 4 motherboard - I had to replace this guy's cooked motherboard with one of our own. The one we took it from was this Vista test box I had assembled a while back, and when all was said and done we had a spare 3.0 GHz P4 CPU lying around. So I called dibs, and even though I have no actual need for more power - my PC was absurdly fast, did everything I wanted it to, and it did it quickly; the only thing I really couldn't do was play recent games all that well, but that's more the fault of my video card, and to be honest I'd rather play my DS or Sega Saturn. It's not like I'm going to turn down the chance to upgrade, though.
So I put the chip in my computer, everything seems to be working just fine, I'm running some h264 fansubs and Ninja Terminator and a few console emulators all at once and everything's running just peachy keen, but I'm getting weird noises from the fan, and a strange beeping I'd never heard before. Now, I'm not a big fan of my computer making noises I haven't heard before. It's like your heart skipping beats - well, not quite, of course, I'd be dead if my heart stopped, and I'd just be out a whole lot of fansubs and pornography if my computer ate shit.
It was the heat sensor. I've never actually worried about heat. Pentium 4s run hot, very hot, which is why you attach a giant hunk of aluminium and a huge unwieldy fan on top of it. But heat isn't good, heat is the computer killer, and now that I was notified about it, and that my computer had never cracked the 80 degree point but was now giving me guff whenever I did anything remotely processor intensive, I was a bit wound up. I put my 2.4 back in, and noticed that one was getting close to cracking 80 as well. It was something I never worried about before, but now I was totally on edge and looking for anything at all to make it just a little bit cooler.
Now, I'm reasonably good with computers. I should be, it's my job, more-or-less. That is, I'm at least comfortable with them, and I'm not afraid of breaking them, and basically know where everything goes and what it needs to go in. Yet, I'm deficient in my knowledge in a lot of ways - I've been a lazy bastard about teaching myself, just choosing to learn everything on-the-job, though I've been finally starting to do some self-study. Sometimes I don't know as much about specifics as I should. One of those specifics was the model of my processor. I had thought my processor was a P4 Prescott - The Prescott model runs way, way, way hotter than anything else, tending to just barely stay below the throttling line, the line where the processor actually starts to slow down because it's getting too hot. I'm talking to someone, he seems to think it's a Northwood - Northwoods, by comparison, run twenty or thirty degrees cooler as a rule. I look it up, hey, I guess Prescotts started at 2.8 GHz or something? (SECRET HINT FROM THE PROS: don't always trust the Wikipedia) I'm only running a 2.4? Well, then I guess I'm running a Northwood here! One running absurdly hot! I'm thinking something's fucking up really badly and search for anything to reduce the heat a bit, weird fan/scoop combinations and thinking about buying expensive heatsinks and all that, when I finally get the inkling in my dinosaur skull that "Hey, maybe I should actually check the model number on my CPU to make sure it's a Northwood!". Sure enough, it was a Prescott, there were 2.4 Prescotts, I'm running a bit hot and did wind up putting an outflow fan in my case (to which one of the people I was talking to on IRC responded "You hadn't done that already?"), but was generally within acceptable heat parameters. Plunked the 3.0 in again, turned off the heat alarm, and everything is running just fine.
Well, until the next day when I start smelling burning wire - It's a smell which anyone who understands anything about electronics knows and has nightmares on a regular basis about - and frantically ripped it open again and found that shitty hard drive fan I had put on my 320 GB main drive was basically melting. So that was easy to fix. The rule is that $5 hard drive fans probably aren't worth the trouble. The damned thing probably generated more heat than it dispersed; I'm very likely better off just barebacking it like I am now.
Oh, I also wound up getting a new 250 GB drive to replace my 60 GB drive, and once again I didn't have the slightest need for it. With my 60 gone, I had... a 320, a 160, and a 100 left. I had well over 100 GB free; hell, I've got an empty 20 GB partition lying fallow that I had planned on sticking the Vista pre-release or Linux or something on that I haven't bothered with because LAZY, and with actually burning off some of the crust that's been accumulating in my /downloads/ directories, I probably could have freed up another fifty or sixty gigabytes. Back in the old days, I was always running on margins of single megabytes; hell, kilobytes. When decent video codecs and MP3 came along, I was still basically having to run my computer completely bereft of anything aside from a few vital tools and a couple dozen console ROMs just so I could watch some movies and listen to some music music. And back in the days when Neo Geo emulation was the big thing, I had to crank the amount of virtual memory I was running up into the hundreds of megabytes so that I could run King of Fighters '98 on my modest 48 megs of RAM, thus squeezing my two gigabytes of hard drive space even thinner. But no, I guess I've become so averse to disk management in these heady days of ludicrously cheap memory, that instead of watching my hard drive space creep into the double digits (or would that be undecal digits?), I'd rather just spend the $90 for another two-hundred-and-fifty-billion bytes, and use that space that could very likely hold the entirety of humanity's written culture for... more fansubs and porn. Technology truly has enriched our lives, hasn't it?
Oh yeah, Yotsuba&! Volume 4 is FINALLY coming out over here. Though I've already read everything in it, both fan-translated and stumble-through-half-understanding-with-JWPCE-open-in-the-background raw, I'm still excited as hell and think we should all buy it. Also you should dance, too, because I think this is certainly worth dancing over. Yes.