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1051
Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do
« Last post by nosh on February 19, 2008, 02:34 PM »
Oh, man, the Duron made a hole in the table :o
-Lashiec (February 19, 2008, 09:03 AM)

Ouch!

Update: Took the good doctor's advice and got me a new cabinet - a big suction fan in the front, right in front of the HDDs which are a good 2 inches apart. Two suction fans at the side- a big one pitching right at the CPU, a smaller one at the gfx card. A bigger exhaust at the rear, in addition to the regular sized one that came with the cabinet. Took my old cabinet's exhaust and attached it to the gfx card - way easier than I'd expected. So totally I have uh... six fans, seven counting the PSU.  :'(

Right, the HDDs are sitting at 35°, the GPU is at 38° ( :-*)  & the Prescott... well, it's hovering between 80 & 90 - blame Intel, not me! Will check out the videos later, now that it's something that happens to other people and (hopefully) not me, I may even see the humor in it.

PS: All three large fans at the front, side & rear have this eerie neon blue light, so now when the lights are turned out my bedroom looks really shady - or really cool - depending on who you are.
1052
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!
« Last post by nosh on February 19, 2008, 03:45 AM »
For me, a very nice feature of locate32 is that it can run completely from it's index-database, without accessing files on disk (thus possibly spinning up harddrives, and definitely slowing down a bit compared to not accessing files).
-f0dder (February 19, 2008, 03:33 AM)

Doesn't it already do this? As in, when you search, doesn't it access just the database? 
1053
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Locate 3.0 - great *FAST* HD search tool!
« Last post by nosh on February 19, 2008, 03:23 AM »
You can't even compare the two coz IIRC Locate doesn't index content.

My wishlist for Locate (which IMO, would make it the best file search tool on the planet):
  • Realtime indexing - very low on resource consumption, better (perfect) results, no CPU spikes as with scheduled indexing.
  • Thumbnail mode for graphic files (would give it an outright advantage over other FS tools that do realtime indexing, none that I know of have this implemented)
  • Panes for listing recently added/changed & recently launched files (like with Ava Find)
  • Popup window showing files being added/modified (like in Filetracer)
1054
Living Room / Re: Ralf Maximus - MIA?
« Last post by nosh on February 19, 2008, 01:50 AM »
I heard from Ralf: He's ok, dealing with some issues in life, and will be back soon.  :up:
-mouser (February 18, 2008, 06:50 PM)

*Takes cover* :D
1055
Living Room / Re: Looking for a good bartenders guide
« Last post by nosh on February 18, 2008, 12:29 AM »
BarBack has a TON of recipes! IIRC, it'll even let you specify what ingredients you have and then suggest stuff you can make using those...

Related material... :P
1056
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 05:05 PM »
Shite! Where were you yesterday when I took so much heat?  ;D
1057
Living Room / Re: Ralf Maximus - MIA?
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 04:50 PM »
Hmmm... didn't notice that but his last post was made quite some time back.
1058
Living Room / Ralf Maximus - MIA?
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 04:39 PM »
Or simply put, where is Ralf?  :)

I thought he was one of DC's more entertaining/knowledgable members. I can't help but notice there's been no sign of him since the Codetrucker threads where things got a bit heated. I don't know him well enough to PM him  - so, where is Ralf?
1059
Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 04:20 PM »
Oh, 30C ambient temperature - that certainly doesn't help :)

Most decent cases will have room for an intake fan or two in the front, usually 120mm these days, although 90mm or 80mm also exist.
-f0dder (February 17, 2008, 03:41 PM)

I'll probably spare myself the grief then and just go for a new cabinet _and_ try to attach a fan to the GPU too coz I have a feeling general cabinet fans may fall a bit short there!

As far as I can tell you have an old (not socket 775) motherboard, so you can't do The Good ThingTM and find a cheap core2 CPU that'll outperform the Pentium4 (running cooler as well) :)

True, just bought 2GB RAM and the guy who sold it tells me I won't be able to use it with a Core2 Duo- sucks!  :P
1060
Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 04:11 PM »
(well, 30 ºC is lower than 85 ºC anyway :D)
-Lashiec (February 17, 2008, 03:18 PM)

Very true :d but I've only ever had the overheating freezes when I have just the (room) ceiling fan on, the ambient temperature though it just varies by a few degrees seems to make a big difference. The card does have a heatsink and it also has these small springy clip things so I guess those would be for attaching a fan, that'll be my first priority. I would also like to go for another fan for the case but I'm a bit concerned about the power supply falling short - I know I upped the capacity after the previous one blew out ( :up:) but I haven't the foggiest about how much power I can spare for additional components.

My case's front intake fan utilizes 3 of my 9 available drive bays
I have just one drive bay to spare, I'm thinking something at the side that directly cools the components would make a lot more sense. I don't mind shelling out for a decent cabinet if I don't find a good solution, one I'll hopefully be able to reuse for my next PC.
1061
Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 02:59 PM »
80-90C? That's insane... that must be a really cramped minitower case :-s

It's not! It's one of those bigass ones and it isn't crammed with too many components either.  :( But it has just one fan at the rear. I meant to ask about cooling anyway, this issue recurred and drove me batshit - I _think_ I've finally narrowed it down successfully to the gfx card overheating. The card doesn't have its own fan and I'm not sure if I can attach one to it.

If I go for additional fans for the cabinet where would they get attached? Will I need to go for a new cabinet with a big (suction) fan at the side in addition to the rear fan or will they fit on my mobo somehow? I would ideally like to go for a system that actually cools the air coz the ambient temperature here in Bombay can get pretty high (in the 30s) during the summers if I shut off the air conditioning. I've also heard of drive bay(?) fans, sitting in an unused CD drive slot and sucking in air, seemed pretty interesting - are these any good?     
1062
Living Room / Re: Cooking my PC: what NOT to do
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 01:44 PM »
I suppose the fact that my CPU usually hovers in the 80-90°C range will come as a mild surprise then.
Clipboard01.jpg

The ambient temperature right now is around 26° C. I don't kid when I call it a frying pan, but it's rugged! - I've had more problems with my GPU overheating than I've had with the CPU. The only time it has been a problem is during the summers if I haven't used the dust-blower for a few weeks and I leave the house with the A/C turned off, it can get a little *cough ~100°* out of hand then.  :-[

Moral of the story: These things are more rugged than we give them credit for.
And yes, moral #2 = I need a good cooling system, stat! (For the GPU, if nothing else.)

The system with a Prescott CPU shuts down at a higher temperature than that with a Northwood. The latter's peak was, in our case, 98°C, while Prescott never shut down at temperatures below 101°C, sometimes even working on at 105°C.

http://www.digit-lif...hrottling/index.html



 

1063
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 17, 2008, 08:32 AM »
Not exactly on high speed broadband but yeah, quite a few TCP connections established at the moment. :)

J-Mac, DOpus is notorious when it comes to resource consumption but it actually does seem to put what it takes out of your system to good use. I'm not a DOpus regular but I remember its GUI being more fluid than most of the competition from when I tried it, especially when it came to stuff like browsing heavily populated folders in thumbnail mode. It's probably doing a lot of internal cacheing to stay a step ahead of the user.
1064
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 02:11 PM »
The 20% spikes were partly because of the network transfer, Comodo seems to like uTorrent much better so it'll be substituting Sygate for good shortly.
1065
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 01:27 PM »
Well, CPU strength would be an obvious contributing factor.
I notice that if I let the PC just sit for a minute without touching anything it does go better than 80%. Sygate seems to be the consistent offender here, it's on its way out shortly anyway.
cpu.jpg

Disclaimer: Haven't disabled anything for the screenshot.


1066
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 11:51 AM »
Thanks for the link Darwin, the method I knew to work was - Delete Device -> Reboot - and it didn't fail me this time either.

f0dder, between the startup folder, HKCR/Run & HKLM/Run I have 42 items enabled (just counted) and I have a P4 3GHz so I can't exactly afford to complain.  :-[

I do have a "Minimal" startup profile that I use for gaming, I'm sure the results are somewhat better then. :)
1067
General Software Discussion / Re: "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 11:15 AM »
Bang on the money, f0dder! Thanks. I had a optical media recovery software that would do this every time so I did know about the PIO issue killing burn speeds but I never would have guessed it could cause interrupt spikes too. This probably happened coz a friend got a DVD-RW to my place a couple of days back that kept coastering for some reason, I generally just stick to DVD+R. Why can't these momos atleast warn me when they do this?  :mad:

Carol, the firewall was off but yeah 70-80% idle is not that unusual if I'm in hands-off mode. :) I try and stay away from any kind of realtime scanners or (content) indexing programs as far as possible. It's not always like that of course - I run Firefox, after all.
1068
General Software Discussion / Re: How to search for folders by size?
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 09:36 AM »
Ava Find does show folder sizes and it'll sort on size too. The only snag is there's no easy way to specify a location to search, any filter you set will apply to all future searches too! But, it's instantaneous and depending upon the situation could be the fastest solution.

Finding empty folders is quite straightforward in X² - it'll let you search for folders with a filter for content=0.
I can specify byte sizes in  the content field but that doesn't seem to work like it should and I don't get any results.

It's fairly simple if you break the task up though. Search for all folders under the target location --> enable showing sizes for folders found --> search these results for specific size (min,max,range). I have a feeling if you break the task up similarly it should be possible with most good file managers.

Props to Don for his attitude!  :)

 
1069
General Software Discussion / "Interrupts" - killing my CPU!
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 08:56 AM »
My system really choked today while copying a few large files from a DVD on my machine to another PC on the network.
Process Explorer showed "Interrupts" lingering between 30 and 45(!)% CPU. I disabled the firewall which was eating another 20% but the PC still somewhat stuttered. Once the copying finished it immediately reached its normal idle state ~80% free. I realise hardware interrupts are integral to hardware access but is there some way to alleviate the situation? Perhaps a BIOS/firmware/system setting that could be tweaked? Maybe better quality media? :) I've never had the PC slow down this bad under similar circumstances in the past.
1070
General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every 60 seconds?
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 05:57 AM »
Why does spysweeper need to have a service running constantly and what is it checking for every 60 seconds?  Nonsense.  It should just run when i need to clean my pc.  Oh well, good riddance.  I've read it's a great program, however.
-superboyac (February 15, 2008, 11:08 PM)

It's the same story with MS's Windows Defender, I just disable the sevice and start it manually on the rare occasion that I do scan. Spyware Doctor has a free edition available, BTW (bundled with GooGlePack which can be safely uninstalled, IIRC). They've unbundled most of the realtime crap from the freebie, PERFECT!

Edit: G
1071
Living Room / Re: about to switch to a Widescreen LCD.
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 05:44 AM »
They're awesome for movies though!  :up:
1072
Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: xplorer², a powerful windows file manager and explorer replacement / alterna
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 05:39 AM »
It's nice but hasn't got nearly enough changes to satisfy greedy ol' me, so I've customized the whole menu system as a little treat to myself. I always thought there was too much clutter there which hindered me from using the few menu commands I actually need. The full (original) menu is tucked away under a submenu in case I even need to access something I "disabled"  :-[

menumod.jpg
1073
General Software Discussion / Re: My favorite software! What's yours?
« Last post by nosh on February 16, 2008, 05:24 AM »
Some gems discovered over the past month or so, all of which have already been mentioned on DC:

1074
General Software Discussion / Re: Extend Firefox 2 Contest Winners Announced by Mozilla
« Last post by nosh on February 13, 2008, 12:43 PM »
It's very impressive. Way faster than I expected something like this to be (esp. sitting inside Firehog)
I only wish:
- It would be enabled for all sites and not just a chosen few.
- There was a way to easily save images (big drawback this, unless I missed something.)
1075
General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Last post by nosh on February 13, 2008, 10:19 AM »
Or delete a few files?  ;D
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