It was easy in the old days!
Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 1:39 pm
A bit OT perhaps..
I'm (hopefully) in my last year of education, and am the only one who knows about computers in our house of four. One of my housemates computer randomly didn't start anymore. After some angry looks by me, it worked again for a week, until the problem came back. I've seen this problem before with slot P2 / p3 systems, and I figured taking it apart, cleaning the contacts of the pci cards / agp card / ram and cpu slot should do the trick.
It is a P3 (no heat spreader is all I know) slot type, with a rocket 5cm fan and a noisy low power psu. This system probably uses about 60W total and I recalled her complaining about the noise...
Since I had to 'rebuild' it anyway, I put a half decent YS-tech fan in the PSU and used my only left over 6cm fan on the CPU, which had no clearance for a bigger fan. Both set to 5v.
It was a 5 minute job, and transformed the computer into a 'pretty quiet' one. The PSU feels warm but certainly not problematic. It doesn't have a lot of power to deliver anyway. The cpu is cool, maxing out in the 40s. Prime95 stable, voltages very stable, and a happy housemate. The worst thing about old computers is the terrible whine from the harddisks! This one is not too bad, but the HD is probably the only part of a pc that got easier to silence over the last 5 years!
I'm (hopefully) in my last year of education, and am the only one who knows about computers in our house of four. One of my housemates computer randomly didn't start anymore. After some angry looks by me, it worked again for a week, until the problem came back. I've seen this problem before with slot P2 / p3 systems, and I figured taking it apart, cleaning the contacts of the pci cards / agp card / ram and cpu slot should do the trick.
It is a P3 (no heat spreader is all I know) slot type, with a rocket 5cm fan and a noisy low power psu. This system probably uses about 60W total and I recalled her complaining about the noise...
Since I had to 'rebuild' it anyway, I put a half decent YS-tech fan in the PSU and used my only left over 6cm fan on the CPU, which had no clearance for a bigger fan. Both set to 5v.
It was a 5 minute job, and transformed the computer into a 'pretty quiet' one. The PSU feels warm but certainly not problematic. It doesn't have a lot of power to deliver anyway. The cpu is cool, maxing out in the 40s. Prime95 stable, voltages very stable, and a happy housemate. The worst thing about old computers is the terrible whine from the harddisks! This one is not too bad, but the HD is probably the only part of a pc that got easier to silence over the last 5 years!