Sunday, October 17, 2010

Panic and relief

I was reading an article about a game (Bioshock Infinite) when I noticed my arm... it had white hairs in it. I freaked out and ran to Sandi "Oh no! My arm hairs are turning white!" She pitied me but then straightened me out: Those aren't your hairs. Those are Cookie's hairs.

Whew! I had been playing with my dog and her hairs were all mixed in with mine.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Ha ha. The joke is on me.

So a month ago I started having problems with my [old] PC. It was overheating, specifically the graphics card. The NVidia 470 had performed flawlessly up to that point and all of a sudden, at IDLE it was running at 79 C.

I was baffled, I tried cleaning it out; I took it apart and reseated the heat sink (scraped off the old paste and applied arctic silver), etc. Nothing worked. When I played games it got up to 100 C!!

So I decided, alright, I'll install MSI Afterburner and apply a custom fan plan (basically the thing was whistling along at about 60% to 70% to keep the temps at a reasonable value). This has been a great machine and has served me well, so I wiped it clean and reinstalled Windows 7 planning to give it to my son... and wouldn't you know it: The card was idling at 41 C. It had to be some kind of driver issue? I don't know. But now the machine is running great. I am updating Windows... perhaps if it starts overheating again I can roll back the updates to determine what caused the problem.

Anyway, Isaac is getting a smoking machine. Here are the relevant specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
8 GB RAM @ 1066
NVidia 470

I think Anabelle will get the Aluminum iMac and I'll maybe sell her G5 iMac on Craigslist or something.