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chmod1337

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Everything posted by chmod1337

  1. Seeing how many business applications hat troubles with the new OS version string, I'm very happy that my games still work, even some of the older ones from over 10 years ago... Seems Microsoft did a good job on this one
  2. The title says it all... how not to water cool an elitebook. As some might know I own an rather old HP elitebook 6930p which Is really difficult to break, but I finally managed to do so... Actually it happened a while ago, but I decided to share this with you when I stumbled across the pictures I had taken when it happened. It all began with a fan noise that was unusual. The fan was spinning fast even though CPU load was low, the fan was spinning at full capacity. I realized that it must be a heat related problem, so I figured that it was time to repaste CPU and GPU. However I quickly realized that not the thermal paste was the problem, but the heat sink itself. One one end it was almost 100°C (212°F), while the other end remained cold even with the fan off. Heat sinks can break and you might not even see where, the problem is not the small air gap in the heat sink, but the crack through which the fluid, that is actually transporting the heat inside the sink thanks to phase change, can now escape. I quickly ordered a new heat sink, but it would be days before it arrived and I really needed the laptop! The picture should speak for itself. But I need to add a word of advice, DO NOT try this at home! I used distilled water and even that is slightly conductive to electricity thanks to autoprotolysis of water. So make sure you can keep the water away from the electronics if you ever attempt something similar... The setup worked pretty well, though not as efficiently/silently as the new heat sink. Also you need an external keyboard, since you have to remove the internal one to get access to the motherboard.
  3. A lot of it depends on the batch, that is why you find many people saying that they bought XY drives of one manufacturer and either only few or too many failed, forgetting that they bought them all from the same batch. Age seems to be an important factor, you can expect the brand new models to have initial quirks. But you have to be careful when picking the models, e.g. 1.5 TB drives were initially made of three 500GB platters, later manufacturers switched to two of the newer 750GB platters. They can be distinguished by the detailed(/cryptic) name of the model, but usually not by the marketing name. Your usage pattern can influence the wear of your drives. Eco/Green and Mobile models usually have a small spin down time, that means the will quickly spin down after your last access and spin up when needed again. This can save power and money, but it does also wear out the disks. My advice: Stop worrying about drive reliability and make backups. If uptime/availability is your concern build a RAID (I know we are talking about external drives) with devices from different batches/manufacturers and avoid WD drives (except Red and Enterprise), as the do not feature TLER.
  4. It seems that has already happened, I don't see any of your posts in queue for approval and you got already 7 posts. Just wait until the server reloads permissions. If you still can't download anything in 1-2h please contact an administrator. The way I know svl7 that is not going to happen, had some bad experience with that. People came here to download didn't even read the support thread, posted their issues on NBR or similar and then complained there that the files weren't working as advertised. That left a bad reputation for the modder and the forums bandwidth was used up by leechers rather than members. But I'm glad to hear that you are one of the reasonable guy out there.
  5. Psst. Read the forum rules! There is something written about 5 quality posts Not unless someone risks a DMCA takedown request... The file stays here and people come here to get it, get support and provide feedback.
  6. Have you seen Xonars G-Series Unlocked BIOS Thread? http://forum.techinferno.com/msi/1839-msi-g-series-unlocked-bios.html
  7. Have you checked the system log for other, seemingly unconnected irregularities that might exist? I am asking, because it is often the last thing I try when fixing a problem, for two reasons. 1. I forget about the system log. 2. I do not have to try anything else, the fix becomes clear.
  8. You should at least provide a price range and usage profile. I don't know if the 6 core processor is necessary. I own one myself and found it difficult to make use of all those cores at first. I now use it in a server where the processing power is really used. If your ego doesn't require a 6-core CPU you should consider a 4-core. I realize the AMD FX-6300 is not much more expensive then a AMD FX-4300, but if you look at the clocks it is 3.5GHz vs 3.8GHz (both 4GHz boost) which is certainly worth thinking about. However you could spend some money on memory, 4 GB is pretty low end these days. I think a 2x 4 GB configuration should give you enough breathing room for now and the near future.
  9. I assume you are talking about external speakers, but it doesn't really matter, as I don't have a solution. However my experience is, that problems like flickering screens, buzz noises or even partially working usb are often common ground problems. Sometimes your devices want to share a common ground, sometimes not, it is a bit a gamble. I'd guess, that your vga ground is internally connected to your audio ground and that as long as the computer is running its audio hardware is capable of keeping the voltage between your speaker cables an the audio ground where it is supposed to be (zero, if your audio is off). But when the computer is off and the vga cable attached, the vga cable acts like an antenna and the voltage of its ground starts fluctuating like wild and together with it, the ground of the speakers. Maybe a high quality vga cable with a ferrite core close to your computer can help. I also remember that with vga cables one pin is sometimes connected and sometimes not, you might want to investigate that too.
  10. There is no need to flash any aftermarket firmware for this... As you correctly pointed out, you should assign a static IP address that is not in the range of the dhcp server of your 1st router to your 2nd router (technically you degraded it to wifi access point). On your 2nd router you should also disable any guest wifi and the dhcp server. The dhcp server on the second router isn't a problem in itself, as long as the dhcp ranges do not overlap, but consumer grade router do advertise themselves as default gateway via dhcp and this is not what you want. Also you cannot use the the wan port on your second router, as it won't be bridged to the lan ports/wifi. Both issues can be addressed by using aftermarket firmware such as OpenWrt, but it is not necessary. You might want to use the same wifi- essid/encryption/password to make roaming easier for your devices. Also note that 300ft ~= 90m which is close the the 100m that the ethernet standard defines as the max distance before the signals have to be amplified, so you might want to keep an eye on the cable quality. Boosting transmission power is a really bad idea. Not only does it become illegal pretty soon, it is also useless in most cases if not counterproductive. Imagine a device that is far from your wifi access point, it will need to transmit at full power in order for the access point to have a decent signal. However if the device receives a signal that is too strong, it might be fooled into believing that it is near a access point and that it can reduce its transmission power. If you want to improve your signal, you probably want to buy a antenna with a high antenna gain and REDUCE transmission power.
  11. I'd assume that they are internally connected, but if you want to be sure, you can check yourself. According to your diagram A4 is connected to pretty much every ground on the A side, same for B4 with the Grounds on the B side. This looks like a PCIe x8 raiser card, so the pins A49 and B49 should be pretty easy to find (the last ones connected), plug in the raiser cable and check if A49 is really connected to B49 via motherboard.
  12. Yeah, it is frustrating, especially since TB became a common unit. I built a RAIDZ3 pool of 9 2TB drives. 18TB total, but since 3 drives are for redundancy I only have 12TB, and thanks to the terabyte/tebibyte issue I end up with a bit less than 10TB. Needless to say that that drive is almost full.
  13. dd actually isn't that slow if you set a reasonable block size (20M/30M seems about right for my applications) and use bzip2 to compress the image on-the-fly, or even better use parallel bzip2. You can use even more advanced compression technology, but bzip2 worked reasonably well for me. Should look something like: dd if=/dev/sdX bs=20M | pbzip2 > hdd.img.bzip2 If size is more of a concern, you can of course use delta compession. I know this solution is by no means the most powerful one, but it is simple, flexible, reliable and you do not have to use any proprietary software. Give dd another try! dd and bzip2 have never failed me, others have.
  14. Have you tried cleaning your DV9 and replacing the thermal paste of the cpu and gpu?
  15. Depends. If you do the calculation 64Gb should theoretically be enough. However if you are like most users and install a few more programs and have some documents on your disk, you will run out of space pretty soon. If you have a second conventional disk for other programs and most of your documents and media files, this will work well. But it also means slow access to those files, especially when your disk needs to spin up first, because you haven't accessed it for a while. Having a conventional disk also draws much more power than a ssd, so if you have a notebook you give away (some/all) of your energy savings, maybe you end up with even less mobility (if your hdd does frequent spin ups). Also keep in mind that ssd performance is best with a lot of unused disk space. I think you can do nothing wrong with 128Gb because the price difference is small and the gain is big (double space/more preformance/simpler setup/investment into the future/reselling). A note of warning: Some notebooks have special height restrictions, you might want to consither those before buying. ---- just realized your post is in the desktop storage section. My recommendation however remains the same.
  16. The gap between the heatpipes doesn't dissipate much heat, it has little surface (compared to the finns) and there is probably not much air flow anyways. Filling the gap would cover the surface, but also create new. It would certainly transport some heat, but an experiment would be needed to see if the effect is positive. Thermal capacity would certainly increse by a few percent, but this has no positive effect except for a very small timeframe.
  17. I think so too, because adding pennies leads to gaps which you have to fill with thermal paste, this is always worse than one solid piece of metal. For me such a thing will never be a real solution, but an ugly hack. Also modern pennies are mostly zinc with a copper plating, while earlier models were really mostly copper. The specific thermal conductivity of zinc is far worse than that of copper, it is even far behind that of aluminum which is roughly half as good as copper.
  18. Looks like a pretty decent system as far as I can tell. If you are planning on adding more HDDs in a RAID, you might want to consider a different HDD. The WD Black series (as well as the Blue and Green series) lack the TLER feature. As for HDD power consumption, 5 Watts when busy is an often used figure for 5400/7200 rpm drives and usually worked for me. However you should expect a 10 Watts peak when the drives are spinning up. I had to learn that the hard way. I had 11 drives and usually zero or one sometimes two "random" drives failing to start on boot. This usually is not a disaster as the data is still on the drive and available after rebooting. If however this is a drive of a RAID array, the array becomes degraded and on the next reboot the "failed" drive has to be re-synced from scratch. If you reboot too early, you might lose the array. Once I had figured the cause, the fix was easy - a new, more powerful PSU.
  19. This is the rule of thumb for large area deployment, where you have control over all access points. It might very well be that your neighbors force you to choose to choosing another channel. Also the 1-6-11 channel rule is by no means the only possible combination, only the most often used one and is only valid for a channel width of 20 MHz. 802.11n also specifies 40 Mhz channels and you should consider the 3-11 pattern for your deployment. You might want to have a closer look at the WiFi spectrum with inSSIDer inSSIDer for Home – Discover The Wi-Fi Around You | MetaGeek
  20. Wait a little longer and report back later. Your posts have to be approved first and the database has to be updated.
  21. Are you referring to the drop in throughput when the card is scanning for other APs or have you discovered another effect here? I am asking because my roaming Aggressiveness is set to Maximum to encourage switching between my different APs when I move to another room.
  22. Interesting Question. I never gave much thought about WiFi design in notebooks, but I have seen a few designs of routers with WiFi. The chip description states dual band capability, so the card should be capable of operation in the 5 GHz band. The device in question is your notebook or to be more precise your notebooks antenna(s)(I really hope you have more than one). For directed antennas you need different ones for the 2.4 GHz range and the 5 GHz range, however I do not think this is the case in most notebooks. If different (directed) antennas were common in notebooks, the card needed separate connectors for the different antennas (groups). The card has a two antennas, but those are required by the MIMO technology in 802.11n devices to achieve the 300MB/s speed (2x 150 MB/s). The whole antenna/radio chain/spatial streams discussion is too complicated to be discussed here in full, but you will find plenty of interesting articles if you are interested. Short: I am pretty sure this will work and I wouldn't hesitate buying the card, as it costs only 30$. If the card doesn't work for some reason you can still sell it at the T|I Marketplace In any case sure you report back here.
  23. I honestly don't have an idea what could be causing you problems, but I have a couple of questions/suggestions. What is the SMART status of the disk? do you have defect sectors on your HDD? have you swapped for another hdd? You mentioned a clean install, did the system work fine before or is it a new system? How is the performance before installing any drivers? Have you tried re-installing the OS? Are we talking about 32 or 64 bit version of Windows 8? What happens when you install Windows 7? What if you upgrade (not re-install) it to Windows 8?
  24. A Clockwork Orange Whenever I browse my film collection (alphabetically sorted) for a nice film, I play this one as soon as I read the title. This basically means I hardly watch anything but 2001 A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange I really like how Kubrick works with bright light sources and the almost photography like scenes. An art you don't see very often in today's films.
  25. You need 5 (4 more to go) approved quality posts to become full member with download/PM/... privileges. Or you can become T|I Elite member with even more privileges. You might want to read the forum rules for more information.
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