THE COMPUTER THREAD

[Variety of Cells]

When it's cold out I have to pre-heat my computer before she starts. When I fire it up it goes to a blue screen telling me it can't find the boot drive. So I let it spin and heat up for a minute, turn it off, then back on, and voila.

There must be some connection that doesn't quite make it when the metal is contracted, but makes it when it's hot and expanded a bit. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I'm curious if it's on my mother board or SSD. It has happened on two SSDs, but the second was a replacement for the first, so it's the same brand and model.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

When it's cold out I have to pre-heat my computer before she starts. When I fire it up it goes to a blue screen telling me it can't find the boot drive. So I let it spin and heat up for a minute, turn it off, then back on, and voila.

There must be some connection that doesn't quite make it when the metal is contracted, but makes it when it's hot and expanded a bit. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I'm curious if it's on my mother board or SSD. It has happened on two SSDs, but the second was a replacement for the first, so it's the same brand and model.

I've seen that kind of problem quite often repairing equipment over the years, it's usually a micro-crack (ring crack) in the solder around a pin somewhere, you would think when things expand due to heat the problem would get worse due to gaps getting wider, but the different expansion coefficients of the different materials seem to favor closing the cracks in the solder as a board warms up.

If you have extra SATA ports on the motherboard you could try a different one to test if it's a problem with just that one port.

[Variety of Cells]

When it's cold out I have to pre-heat my computer before she starts. When I fire it up it goes to a blue screen telling me it can't find the boot drive. So I let it spin and heat up for a minute, turn it off, then back on, and voila.

There must be some connection that doesn't quite make it when the metal is contracted, but makes it when it's hot and expanded a bit. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I'm curious if it's on my mother board or SSD. It has happened on two SSDs, but the second was a replacement for the first, so it's the same brand and model.

I've seen that kind of problem quite often repairing equipment over the years, it's usually a micro-crack (ring crack) in the solder around a pin somewhere, you would think when things expand due to heat the problem would get worse due to gaps getting wider, but the different expansion coefficients of the different materials seem to favor closing the cracks in the solder as a board warms up.

If you have extra SATA ports on the motherboard you could try a different one to test if it's a problem with just that one port.

A good idea. But can I switch sata ports with a boot drive like that?  Will the motherboard look for the boot drive on the other port of it doesn't find it where it usually is?

[MartyS (Gromit)]

When it's cold out I have to pre-heat my computer before she starts. When I fire it up it goes to a blue screen telling me it can't find the boot drive. So I let it spin and heat up for a minute, turn it off, then back on, and voila.

There must be some connection that doesn't quite make it when the metal is contracted, but makes it when it's hot and expanded a bit. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I'm curious if it's on my mother board or SSD. It has happened on two SSDs, but the second was a replacement for the first, so it's the same brand and model.

I've seen that kind of problem quite often repairing equipment over the years, it's usually a micro-crack (ring crack) in the solder around a pin somewhere, you would think when things expand due to heat the problem would get worse due to gaps getting wider, but the different expansion coefficients of the different materials seem to favor closing the cracks in the solder as a board warms up.

If you have extra SATA ports on the motherboard you could try a different one to test if it's a problem with just that one port.

A good idea. But can I switch sata ports with a boot drive like that?  Will the motherboard look for the boot drive on the other port of it doesn't find it where it usually is?

Where a drive is plugged in doesn't seem to matter with SATA like it used to with IDE.  The drives themselves are flagged as bootable or non-bootable and the dependency on hardware switches and cable positions seems to be gone, last time I built a system I didn't even pay attention to the port numbers when plugging in the drives.

[Variety of Cells]

When it's cold out I have to pre-heat my computer before she starts. When I fire it up it goes to a blue screen telling me it can't find the boot drive. So I let it spin and heat up for a minute, turn it off, then back on, and voila.

There must be some connection that doesn't quite make it when the metal is contracted, but makes it when it's hot and expanded a bit. Took me forever to figure out what the problem was. I'm curious if it's on my mother board or SSD. It has happened on two SSDs, but the second was a replacement for the first, so it's the same brand and model.

I've seen that kind of problem quite often repairing equipment over the years, it's usually a micro-crack (ring crack) in the solder around a pin somewhere, you would think when things expand due to heat the problem would get worse due to gaps getting wider, but the different expansion coefficients of the different materials seem to favor closing the cracks in the solder as a board warms up.

If you have extra SATA ports on the motherboard you could try a different one to test if it's a problem with just that one port.

A good idea. But can I switch sata ports with a boot drive like that?  Will the motherboard look for the boot drive on the other port of it doesn't find it where it usually is?

Where a drive is plugged in doesn't seem to matter with SATA like it used to with IDE.  The drives themselves are flagged as bootable or non-bootable and the dependency on hardware switches and cable positions seems to be gone, last time I built a system I didn't even pay attention to the port numbers when plugging in the drives.

Cool. I'll have to remember to try that when it's not hot as balls out.

[LucasM]

Chrome's latest update removed the SINGLE functionality that got me to use it for anything.  In the 'Print' area for websites, it had a 'Simplify Page' function that eliminated 99% of the bullshit clogging pages (ads, stray code, insanely huge margins, etc.).  So now it does nothing but print an unreadable mess that uses up to four or five times as many pages for the same content (with things like code overlapping content making it unreadable).

Anyone have recommendations for a browser that can print to PDFs that does that 'simplify page'-type thing?  Firefox won't print to PDF, only printing to Microsoft's USELESS XPS format (shitty design, no editing, plus all the random shit that now clogs Chrome).

Thanks!

[Variety of Cells]

Wow. Well, I feel like a huge idiot.

For the two years that I've had it, I've written off my Home Thearer PC as slow because I didn't buy the super fast components my gaming rig has. It takes 8 seconds to open most programs. Updating anything takes forever. Web pages load slow and clunky. But I never really looked into it because it's always been that way, so I thought that's just how it was.

But lately it has been choking on streaming video. Any time I full screen something like YouTube, it starts dropping frames like crazy and goes way out of sync, which came to a head when I was streaming the debates live and being frustrated by the quality. Once I realized it wasn't a connection issue, I decided to overclock the CPU to see if that would help it handle the higher resolution.

If only I would have looked two years ago I would have noticed that my 3.2 ghz processor wasn't getting above 800 mhz, which was weird. Then I remembered that I had set the cooling to 'passive' in power settings because the CPU fan was really loud when I first got it, and I figured throttling the CPU a little would help. Setting it to 'active' didn't help though. Which is when I noticed that while 'min power' was set at 5% for the CPU, 'max power' was also set at 5% for whatever stupid reason. No idea why. I face palmed so hard at that moment. No wonder everything was so slow.

Now it's fast as anything.  I backed it off to 70% cause that fan really does get loud, but that's still a 65% increase and it performs great. Feel like such an idiot.

[LucasM]

...when I was streaming the debates live and being frustrated by the quality.

I think we were all frustrated by the quality of the debates.

[Variety of Cells]

...when I was streaming the debates live and being frustrated by the quality.

I think we were all frustrated by the quality of the debates.

Like

[CJones]

That is hilarious. I monitor my heat and load levels obsessively. I fiddle with settings so much that I'm always worried I might have inadvertently broken something.

If I may make a suggestion, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is an awesome, inexpensive, aftermarket heat sink. When I first got my current processor, an AMD FX-8350, the fan on that thing sounded like a jet engine at anything nearing full load. And it wouldn't overclock at all, despite being advertised as "unlocked". When I blew out my PSU back in April, the guy at the shop commented that my CPU was running awfully hot (and loud), and recommended this thing. It was astounding the difference it made. It barely makes any noise at all, even at 100% speed, and I can now overclock my CPU from 4.0 GHtz to 4.5 GHtz without any trouble.

EDIT: One caveat though, it is enormous. Make sure it will actually fit in your case.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

The closed loop liquid cooling options now are awesome.  I've got a Corsair Hydro H60 and love it, silent, keeps the CPU very cool.

If you have a 120mm fan on the back of your case within 6 inches of the CPU it should fit, you just replace that fan with the new fan+radiator.  It also helps if you have easy access to the back of your motherboard, since you have to put a metal bracket back there.

[Variety of Cells]

That is hilarious. I monitor my heat and load levels obsessively. I fiddle with settings so much that I'm always worried I might have inadvertently broken something.

If I may make a suggestion, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is an awesome, inexpensive, aftermarket heat sink. When I first got my current processor, an AMD FX-8350, the fan on that thing sounded like a jet engine at anything nearing full load. And it wouldn't overclock at all, despite being advertised as "unlocked". When I blew out my PSU back in April, the guy at the shop commented that my CPU was running awfully hot (and loud), and recommended this thing. It was astounding the difference it made. It barely makes any noise at all, even at 100% speed, and I can now overclock my CPU from 4.0 GHtz to 4.5 GHtz without any trouble.

EDIT: One caveat though, it is enormous. Make sure it will actually fit in your case.

Thanks for the suggestion, but you pointed out the issue. I bought the smallest case I could find and a micro atx board.  It's all crammed together with no room to spare.  I have it at a good place now though, by pulling the CPU load back a bit.

And yeah, I monitor my gaming rig all the time.  Pretty much all my second monitor is for is monitoring. But the HTPC is my wife's thing and I'm only ever on it if we're watching something or I'm using Steam's in-home-streaming.

Which, come to think of it, says something pretty impressive about in-home-streaming's ability to run smoothly on an 800 MHz processor.

[Variety of Cells]

The closed loop liquid cooling options now are awesome.  I've got a Corsair Hydro H60 and love it, silent, keeps the CPU very cool.

If you have a 120mm fan on the back of your case within 6 inches of the CPU it should fit, you just replace that fan with the new fan+radiator.  It also helps if you have easy access to the back of your motherboard, since you have to put a metal bracket back there.

I have a Corsair Hydro H60 in my gaming rig as well. It's great, I love it. Gets me up to 4.8 GHz. But see my above post for why it wouldn't work.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Which, come to think of it, says something pretty impressive about in-home-streaming's ability to run smoothly on an 800 MHz processor.

If they can make a stick not much bigger than a USB WiFi dongle do netflix and amazon HD streaming that shows that you don't need a ton of CPU power.

[RVR II]

I usually don't post items I have for sale on ebay here on the forum but money has gotten real tight lately.. 3 customers have not settled up on their balance they owe me for taxes and it has thrown my monthly bills into chaos.
I am selling some Dell Latitudes E6530 laptops. I have 1 listed currently:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/152305084937?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
I have 4 total and If I can sell them all before Thanksgiving, I will be able to cover my bills through January when I return from Mexico.
They are all identical and under priced (going for $350 or more) to try and sell them fast. All are in excellent condition