Heat in more than one way


Woke up this morning to computer woes again.

The desktop I’ve been working on for the last however months decided to throw a heat tantrum.

I didn’t realize how much gunky fuzz was on the heatsink, but there it was. Without the aid of compressed air, I got as much of the packed in dust out via a small darning needle and blowing that out with my breath.

There have been other problems, which I’ve been want to admit I could have done something for perhaps. Some mysterious “device driver” error pops up every so often. Some days often, then not at all for days or weeks on end. It’s the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

My laptop didn’t ever do it, may it rest in peace. It has a heat problem which needs to be fixed one way or another. I rarely turn it on anymore. It’s got it’s fresh install of OS and programs, so I know it’s alright, just awaiting a new heart … daughterboard or thermal something. It’s the infamous Vaio Shutdown “bug”. It gets worse as time goes on, once it starts it will only continue and worsen for sure.

So what is it about the desktop system that I didn’t want to do. Well what I wanted was to run my Xp Athlon 2100+ at toppish speed.

Can’t do that with the Memory installed, which is the big problem here. It’s not high quality. In order to run a 266 board w/ DDR memory it’s got to be good stuff. Ask me how I know.

So memory prices go down, down, down. Still there are so many other things we need, so pride must go and I’m running cpu speed at 100/100 and DDR CAS RAS settings at higher numbers, for slower performance, which should stablize the desktop.

So all I get out of my 2100+ is a 1500+, which is still nothing to sneeze at, being that it’s speed is actually a hefty 1.29 Mhz — why hefty? Cause it’s an Athlon. Athlons of this nature are worthy of comarison with Pentium 4, not sure if this one can go there, but with better memory it could surpass Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz.

On my laptop I have a Pentium 4 1.x something Ghz. Not much difference in performane from this desktop, in speed of how everything works.

I mean, really, it’s not a noticeable difference at all.

This is the second AMD processor we’ve had. In 1998 we built, with a friend, a cheap model with a … I can’t even remember. Well, it was roughly equal to a … whatever back then. That’s the old days, technology has far surpassed those times. I still have the processor, on the motherboard, on top of the freezer downstairs though. It was/is a good little horsepowered doohicky. We had a “Pentium” system before that. Yes, that was it’s name. Just plain “Pentium” no numbers or letters. AMD’s K6, that was it, something of that nature, blew that Pentium away. This current processer Athlon XP 2100+, however it runs, at whatever speed, it’s a very, excellent piece of hardware.

So back to the heating issue. I took the temperture settings down, and what it was doing earlier, it had cooled down once I had cleaned it in that silly way, but that wasn’t enough, I had to change the settings before it got to run at 54 Celcius. I can’t blame it for that, it’s not exactly a cool house it’s running in. Wait until Winter, and if no new memory has fixed it, we’ll see how it does in the cold house. 🙂

If I could just say one thing now. Technology may be advancing further and further each day, but this computer and my laptop both have processors that are not relics, though they are both over a year old, by far. The old AMD K6 processor was fairly far down the list in terms of what was hot and new, I mean there were better processers of theirs to get in 1998, but $ was the consideration. Within a few months that computer was really out of tune with much that is done on computers nowadays. But it’s still powerful enough to do email, spreadsheets, wordprocessing … like for children to do educational work on.

So I have no fears of waiting to install more and better memory for the desktop, and seeing if we can get it running a tad faster while being stable as well. I’m happy with this processor. Wanderlust has not struck.


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