Techy WeekendAuthor: jawapro
Date: Tue 10/08/2010 09:13 PM
On Saturday I attempted to do some of the computerish stuff that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now, with mixed results.
First up, I tried installing my new 1TB drive in Karlendorf so it could work as my primary backup location. Unfortunately Karlendorf refuses to boot with a SATA drive in it. So after many attemps and much muttering, I gave up and tried to install one of the smaller IDEs I had lying around. That didn’t work either, and when I tried returning the original 2 80G IDEs, it won’t boot then either. Finally got it booting off one 80G with an external for my backups. One step forward, two steps back.
Next on my to-do list was Phaeton, my main gaming PC. When playing games lately, Phaeton has started beeping. That’s never a good thing, and it only happened after getting my replacement motherboard (after the old one died). I assumed it was a heating issue, but I wasn’t sure what part. Turns out it was the graphics card. When the GPU gets over 70 degrees, it starts to beep.
I tried installing an exhaust fan below the graphics card, but it didn’t really help. Another unsuccessful Saturday attempt. Since then I’ve found a program called nTune which allows you to manually set the fan speed of my graphics card. Setting it to 70% makes it slightly louder, but the GPU doesn’t rise above 55 degrees under load now - which is a better solution to the beeping than simply disconnecting the speaker, which may have been my next trick.
My new 1TB is now in Phaeton as some extra dumping ground. Not going to waste it.
I bought a new PC from work this week, which I’ve named Gromit. Gromit has now been deployed to my parents place, which has allowed me to bring Zoltan back to my place. Zoltan was designed to be my spare gaming PC, and as there’s a LAN at my place this weekend, he’d be very useful.
Thanks to a nifty combination of Robocopy and Crashplan, my server Karlendorf now backups up Phaeton each day (robocopy) and sends another copy of the most important stuff to Gromit (via Crashplan) as an offsite backup. So in theory, if Phaeton dies, I can get stuff from Karlendorf, but if my entire house gets eaten by a T-Rex, I can get my files back from Gromit. Not bad unless Tassie gets nuked, but if that happens, my collection of photos will probably not be my most pressing concern.
So that’s my techy weekend. Now it’s time for some more Starcraft...
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