Out of Gurantee Expiry Chip

I’ve often thought that there was some sort of chip installed inside electrical equipment that would cause them to start failing once the guarantee has expired. True to form my PC has just expired and the graphics card fan bearings are seriously screwed up. To come to this conclusion I did first try to blow out the system with compressed air purchased from PC World today. My Dad thinks it is really funny that a can of air is a tenner a shot. I suppose it is really. I’ve seen air for sale from mountain tops on e-bay, though I don’t think polluted city air with a faint smell of chips wafting over from the take away down the road is not going to be so much of an attractive option.

I have my PC on the desk with its side panel off as the air circulation is enough to cool the system so that the graphics card fan does not to spin and therefore make so much noise. The noise of the thing is incredible, almost as noisy as my old Linux box whose called “wardrobe” for no reason other than its the item of furniture immediately seen to my left. Wardrobe is an old girl dating way back and still going strong. Virtually every piece of wardrobe other than the motherboard has been replaced mind you so I guess technically most of her is not really that old after all. Hmmm..

Its most likely that eventually I will have to buy another graphics card for Dell, but I’m not in any rush for that as I’m not a game player that needs a really flash card. I’m not buying yet mainly because I know there’s a dodgy batch of nvidia cards out there and I don’t want one of them. I don’t want to buy an ATI one because this often means many flavours of Linux will not work properly incase in the future I decide I want to put Ubuntu or similar on Dell. I like to buy cards with future upgradability in mind rather than buying something that will just work for windows based operating systems alone – That will be crap forward planning I think!

Novatech Bad Memory

It was only 2 weeks ago I purchased a stick of 256 SDRAM PC100 memory for my Ubuntu box. Everything was working well for a couple of weeks, until yesterday when bizarre events started to occur. I thought it might had been the hard drive on its last legs because it is a really old and cheap. I did a full test and even reformatted the disk. When re-installing Ubuntu, I noticed the distribution comes with MEMTEST which enables you to test your memory. I ran this on the original configuration, which showed an error.

I removed the new memory and re-ran the test and these errors disappeared. I did try the memory card in different slots as advised on the Novatech themselves. The only time this error got displayed was when the Novatech memory was plugged in. From now on, I’ll be looking at higher quality parts that are produced in South Korea or Taiwan.

I posted back the memory to Novatech and I await for a replacement. I do have a small problem that Ubuntu now won’t run very well with a mere 256meg of Ram and so I have decided to look around for an alternative Linux distribution.

Novatech said they had received the memory, but have chosen not to send a replacement. Some time afterwards I got a delivery of the replacement which was also faulty! I cannot be bothered to send it back again for yet another batch of dodgy memory from this company. It now sits in a bag, on my desk waiting to be dispatched to the dustbin!

Fitting PC100 memory

A 256mb PC100 memory chip arrived today from Novatech. I fitted into my own ubuntu PC without too many problems, but it was fiddly as hell, especially when you have tremors (from rsi). When I put the PC back together again and plugged it in, it worked fine (phew). With 512meg of memory, its made a huge different in its performance. I think in my opinion, Ubuntu really needs 512meg despite what is officially required. I was surprised to get a delivery today from Parcel force since I thought the Post Office was on strike today. Are the post office and Parcel force two different companies now? That would explain it.

I managed after 5 years to take off his case without cutting myself and/or using a hammer on it. This PC that was originally from Evesham is one of those with loads of clips on the sides and top of the chasis, which in the early days when the PC was new it was literally impossible to get inside! And I do mean impossible. To open the case I find using a long flat headed screw driver inserted into the back where the screws were. Then turn the screw driver and this has the effect of prising the case off and over those nasty type clips. Putting the case back on, can be a little tricky, but the way I do it is to bend it outwards a little, wrapping the case around the chassis for all but the last couple of inches. Then pinch the case on the sides inwards and slide it into the annoying clips at the end. When you know how, its as easy as that.

I remember once spending 2 hours trying to put this case on a couple of years back, resulting in using a hammer and a piece of wood to make it slide all the way on using the clips. That day the air was full of many words beginning with F and B! I remember that day well, the day where I decided that fixing computers as a hobby would indeed be the wrong career move.

Upgrading Dell Dimension Memory

The UPS man delivered the 2gigabytes of Crucial Memory I was so eagerly waiting for to uograde my Dell dimension 5000 PC, giving it a total of 3 GB. The reason I need this much memory isn’t because I’m playing the latest computer games, it’s because voice recognition struggles on Windows XP with all is all updates on anything less than 2 GB. Bearing in mind that Windows capable of handling up to 3.5 GB then this is quite a shocking amount of memory to need. Still, it’s made a massive difference to accuracy and performance.

Inside the computer there are only four memory bays, two of them were already in use with two 520mb blocks fitted to their primary slots leaving 2 empty secondary bays. I popped in the 2 X 1GB memory card into the empty secondary slots, thinking this was the correct thing to do but on boot up, the dell PC crashed windows on boot up (it blue screened).

I called Crucial technical support and a really helpful chap called ‘David’ suggested a tried their memory in the primary slots. Bizarrely this worked without a problem. Then I added the two elderly memory cards (One is Samsung and the other is unbranded) and rebooted once again, this worked too. I think David said that the newer faster memory is closest to the processor speed and the primary slots and the idea is you put the slower memory in the secondary slots, I guess. I always thought the memory bays all ran at the same speed, but obviously not on a Dell Dimension range.

Everything seems to be working at the moment, though I have slightly lost my voice due to a cold that is trying to come out.