Month: December 2006

So my computer has been rebooting automatically for quite some time. Usually it occurred when it’s playing a video, so I thought either the graphics card or the drivers for it were problematic, but even after upgrading the drivers and switching in a working nVidia GeForce MX420, the system still rebooted by itself.

I then slowly unplugged one thing after another, finally literally leaving just the RAM, CPU and motherboard and the boot drive. I had ran memtest for over 6 hours with no problems found. I even did a full scan disk and no bad sectors were found. I started to think I have a faulty motherboard or cpu. Although the symptoms I’ve been seeing looked really familiar to what happens when the motherboard detects a system is overheating. However, looking at the temperatures in the BIOS showed that everything was pretty normal, even immediately after a reboot.

The motherboard manual had recommended a 300W power supply and it seemed fine with mye 350W PSU, but I even installed a new SuperFlower 450W PSU and the problem was still there.

So the new motherboard I got was a ECS P4M800PRO-M V2.0 which had a power connector I have never seen before. Instead of 20 pins, it had 24 pins. I thought that was odd and started reading through the manual and it turns out that although there’s a 24 pin power connector port, it said can support either 20 or 24pin power connectors. According to my research, ATX refers to the 20 pin power connector and ATX 12V refers to the 24 pin power connector. Many power supplies has what is known as the 20+4 pin power connector which supports both ATX and ATX 12V, which basically means it has a detachable 4 pin on the power connector.

When I had tried to search online in regards to problems with this motherboard, there were many threads saying this motherboard was problematic with 20 pin power connectors. So I decided to get a 24 pin power supply to see if that’ll help. I dropped by Fry’s and started looking at their power supplies. The parking lot was quite a mess. It was the day after Christmas sale and I had to wait 4x at the traffic light before I even got into their parking lot. You know it’s crazy when they have Fry’s people at the entrance directing traffic and forcing you to loop around the back. Still wasn’t as bad as the Black Friday sale I went to a few years back.

However, it appears that most people were there to return stuff. The checkout line was actually only half filled. The other day when I went there to pick up my cpu/motherboard combo, the parking lot was half filled, but the checkout line was completely packed.

I was going to drop $75 on this Antec SmartPower 2.0 450W Power Supply, but ended up picking up a Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply for $60 instead. To my surprise, there was a $40 rebate on top of it, making it only $20 after rebate. However, it appears that their online website has it for FREE after rebate, but I don’t really have much time left around here so, $20 for the convenience was worth it.

After installing this new power supply, my computer hasn’t rebooted by itself yet, and things seem to be normal. Let’s hope I didn’t jinx it and it continues to run w/o any problems.

Merry Christmas to all!

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and hopefully got all the presents they had wished for.

Speaking of which, I just got this link from Digg: Lenovo – ThinkPad X60 Tablet and this new tablet has some pretty neat features over the previous X41 tablet:

• MultiView/MultiTouch indoor/outdoor viewable touch screen
• High resolution SXGA+ screen
• 802.11n MIMO WiFi
• Embedded WWAN
• Mobile docking solution

*DROOLS* The SXGA+ screen (1400×1050) is awesome! It’s an optional feature, but if I got the X60 Tablet, I would definitely get this screen. The default is XGA (1024×768) which has been what all the X series (12.1″ screen) has always touted, however 1024×768 is a bit lacking. Everything else on my X31 rocks. I just wish the screen had a better resolution. I’ve even sent in customer feedback asking for a better screen. Bill actually told me a month back that the new Thinkpad tablet was getting a better screen, but when I searched, i wasn’t able to find any information on their website, so I thought it was just a fluke he saw.

The additional wireless networking features seem nifty, but I’m not really that interested until it becomes more standardized.

The multi-touch screen is also nifty. Most tablets require you use a metallic stylus pen to work where the screen has a magnet system behind it to detect where the stylus pen is. It’s not a true touch screen. With this multi-touch functionality, it allows you to use you fingers or whatever other funky object you prefer to use to interact with the screen:

I do have to say I was a bit disappointed. When I first read multi-touch, I had thought it was referring to something like the Multi-Touch Interaction Research by Jeff Han. But I guess it’s still neat that you can now interact with your fingers.

I had tried to customize the X60 Tablet, but unfortunately the SXGA+ screen doesn’t seem to be an available option at this moment. I wonder how much that’ll add to the price given the fact that with a regular XGA screen, it’s already over $1,800.

I really wish they’d put this better screen into the regular X-series as I don’t really care for a tablet much.

Random Crap:

I was searching for images of 王晶 (Jing Wong) in movies he produced to show my sister who he was, and I happened to fall upon this cute porcupine image:

(from 杂文选刊)

Things a Man Should Know: About Fatherhood (from Digg) – a rather funny list of things dad’s should know about parenthood. Here’s a couple I thought were insightful or funny:

• Your child, at birth, already has a deeply complicated relationship with his mother, and, for the first year, you are only a curiosity. For a couple of years after that, an amusement-park ride. Then, a referee. And finally, a bank.
• Reason boys are better: They cannot get pregnant.
• The first time you change your son’s diaper and he pees all over you is not an accident. It’s foreshadowing.
• Let them take reasonable risks: A few scrapes in the long run are nothing compared with the scars left by hovering parents. Or tics. In preparation for risks: a Red Cross first-aid course.
• It never hurts to videotape the baby-sitter. Especially if she’s hot.
• Overalls are not only cute, they provide a convenient handle.
• Dropping food on the floor is a new and delightful skill to a one-year-old, not a deliberate attempt to annoy you. However, as small he or she might be, never underestimate an infant’s ability to project chewed food over great distances.
• Beware your child’s uncles, who will teach your kid dirty words, introduce him to liquor, and give him gifts of drums, archery sets, and possibly matches.
• It is, of course, your natural right to exert the above negative influences on your siblings’ offspring.
• Lock or no, please knock before entering, as the disruption of a youth who is spanking his monkey will be twice as traumatic for you as it is for him.
• Unfortunately, those books that say motherhood makes women desire more sex are referring to women who are not your wife.
• If the real response to his question is no, try this instead: “Go ask your mom.”

Carved Watermelon Head (from Neatorama)

So my MPK computer which acts as a file server, printer server, and the main hub I connect into to diagnose problems on computers within this home network, died a few months back. I had asked my sister to do a bunch of test but was unable to determine the cause.

I come back and the whole machine is dead. When I tried booting it up, it was in a constant state of reboot. I don’t even get to see the first screen. I kept removing parts to see what the cause was and finally got down to just the motherboard (now outside of the case), the CPU, the video card, the RAM, and the PSU.

I had tested the PSU on a different machine earlier and it turned out fine, so that was off the list. I then tried swapping graphics card with the ‘spare’ machine (spare being that my brother hasn’t come home yet, so I could take apart his computer if I wanted to) and the graphics card was fine. I did the same with the RAM.

What was left was the CPU and motherboard. I had tried reseating the CPU and reapplying thermal paste to it, but that didn’t seem to help. I thought if I was going to replace either the CPU or motherboard, I might as well go to Fry’s and get a combo. Which I did and ended up getting this:

I wasn’t looking for something fast or fancy, but this was the cheapest combo they had advertised and I didn’t feel like waiting for a better deal. I was also out of the air duster cans so I picked up a few. There was a TON of dust in my case.

Turns out the machine’s actually quite decent. With just the onboard video (VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro IGP) using 64MB shared from 512MB of 333MHz DDR RAM, I was able to play 1080p trailers off Apple.com on Quicktime really smoothly. The CPU that came with this combo was a Pentium D 2.8GHz.

Another reason I picked this combo was because it supported both DDR and DDR2 RAM and since my existing DDR RAM was working, I didn’t feel like splurging to get better RAM as this machine as I said is just a server that doesn’t do much. It also had an AGP slot (although I found out later it had onboard video, which couldn’t be worse than my GeForce MX400 that was in there).

Anyway, installing the CPU was rather interesting. The socket form was something neat and it actually took me half a minute to figure out how to unlatch the CPU lever. The retail fan that came with the CPU was enormous! Though I have to say, it’s pretty quiet. Then I noticed the motherboard had a longer power connector port. I was like, when did PSUs get a longer adapter?!?! At first I was like shoot, got to go back to Fry’s and get another PSU, but it turns out that these new motherboards support BOTH the 20pin and the 24pin power connectors. You just have to leave 4 pins exposed.

The machine booted up fine and I went ahead to repair Windows. Didn’t exactly work. I had hoped not to have to do a full reinstall, but it doesn’t look good. It blue screened when trying to get into Windows and immediately reboots. I then installed XP over the existing OS, but I was getting random faults occuring in random programs and sometimes the machine would just reboot on its own. I finally gave up and did a format and clean install.

I should’ve heeded to my own advice a long time ago about installing OSes only on fresh harddrives. Guess I wanted to take the lazy way out and ended up doing a lot more work.

But it turns out there was actually some memory problem. Doing a memtest resulted in tons of errors. The Crucial 512MB 333MHz by itself ran fine. The Kingston 256MB 266MHz in a seperate machine ran fine too. I’ve concluded that either the 2nd slot on the motherboard is bad, the motherboard didn’t like me mixing 333MHz with 266MHz (although it fell back to 266MHz) or 266MHz was too slow for the CPU.

Anyway, I’m reinstalling the OS for the 4th time with just the 512MB stick in it. It’s really 448MB since 64MB is reserved for the onboard video card.

Ever had someone IM you and a weird side bar comes up? Welp, I didn’t used to care about it since only 3 or 4 people I knew used it and I didn’t chat with them often. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been working on fixing my computer (story to come later). So I’ve been using my laptop in the meantime. I have AIM Pro installed on my laptop since I didn’t like the new AIM Triton client they had available at that time when I installed.

Due to ununusal circumstances where rdpclip.exe wasn’t behaving correctly and using 99% of my cpu power and the clipboard sharing busted, I’ve been using AIM to send text between my laptop and my machine back home and whenever I IM myself, I got this ugly sidebar on my AIM 5.5 client.

Anyway, Cari tells me the same thing so I try to see if there’s a way to disable this theme or “expression” as AIM calls it. I wasn’t able to find out how to disable it from my side, but apparently AIM has an option to disable displaying expressions/themes from other people.

Once you enter the Preferences dialog (F3), goto ‘AIM Expressions’ on the left and look for the area marked “Incoming Expressions”. By default this is ‘unchecked’, but that doesn’t mean that setting reflects what is saved. I had to actually check that box, save that setting by clicking Apply, and uncheck that box and save the settings again before the AIM sidebar thingy disappeared.

I wonder if they fixed this in the later clients.