PC fettling and repairs thread

[Grant Fondo]

Just had a quick google and most of the TI's are £850 odd

yeah the prices are still bananas. Bought my 3080 in sept 2020 and cheapest i can find it is still £70 more, last generation and two and a half years old!
see what you mean about 4070ti's .... this ones reduced on amazon

 

[DCBassman]

HAving a few issues with the I7-2600K SFF box, likely due to just taking the drive from the big Xeon box and slapping it in, rather than a clean install. And in fact, that drive was originally in several other boxes before the Xeon, with that install on, so a wonder it works at all!
Anyhoo, now back in the Xeon box and behaving. If it throws a fit again, I'll completely reinstall from scratch, do it properly for once!
Nice to have 10 cores (20 logical processors) again, however redundant they largely are!

 

[DCBassman]

New plans for the big box.
Because it allows me to reach 'on' buttons and USB ports without bending, I'm going to keep the actual case. The P9X79/Xeon E5-2680v2 board will go to my son, as planned, for his home server.
The I7-2600K SFF box will be cleaned and rebuilt, then sold on.
Going into the big box will be a Gigabyte GA-B85-HD3 Rev2.1 LGA1150 Haswell board, 4th generation Core. It will sport either an i3-4160 or ani5-4440, depending on whether or not the i5 actually works. There's barely any performance difference anyhow. Maybe later, I'll fit an i7-4790K.
The box will be emptied of all its fans bar three, which should make it fairly quiet. I may go against good practice and have the airflow downward in order to reduce dust intake. One front, one top, both filtered, plus a PSU filter. As it won't have the big water cooler in it any more, there will be a bit more room to faff about with the fans and airflow without having to dismantle the whole thing.
I scooped the board, with CPU, cooler and 12GB of RAM, for £25, so should make that back easily selling the i7 box. If it's fast enough as-is, then I'll downsize the PSU at some point also, as it certainly won't need a 650W supply.
May also sell off one of the Asus notebooks...

 

[DCBassman]

All parts arrived, and the deed is done. Now have a cavernous case with next to nothing in it! Realistically, the performance is just about noticeably slower for mundane tasks than the 10-core beast. Much quieter. Has front-panel USB 3 that actually works. Will use a lot less power. I will upgrade that really-quite-good i3-4160, but in all honesty, there's probably little need.

 

[DCBassman]

Really quite impressed with this CPU, it does the job! Every in-use PC in the house is currently running an i3 processor - 1x 1st gen, 2x 2nd gen, 1x 4th gen.

 

[DCBassman]

Currently staying out on Dartmoor with a whopping 4Mb/s internet connection, and just the two Asus laptops to play with, main on W11 and play machine running Linux Mint 21.1.
Because this house is a mix of wood, bricks, stone, etc, wifi is generally not good unless you can get line-of-sight, or nearly, even at 2.4GHz, I brought along a TP-Link Archer T2U Plus wifi dongle, which has a large high-gain antenna. No issue with W11, but to get a driver installed for any Linux is just a tad more involved. Split the screen between browser and terminal, and ask the question of how-to.
Then a 15-minute cut-and-paste session 'twixt browser and terminal. Reboot. Then have to discover how to switch between adapters, but in the event, after a further reboot, it sorted itself out and presented me with a choice, so job done.

Have also been trying some other Linux flavours. Linux Lite: small, easy to install, quick, but not so easy to administer. Manjaro: This might well take over form Mint as my preferred distro. Quick, easy to mess with should you need to, looks good with the Plasma desktop. Very usable considering the low spec of these machines - 4GB RAM, 1.4GHz I3-2365M hyper-threaded dual-core CPU. Both have fast SSDs - Crucial MX750s. Will probably spend this afternoon going back to Manjaro on the play machine.

 

[lazybloke]

After moaning about confusing variations between different linux variants that made a past job difficult, i've settled down with Debian linux on various raspberry pi, and have been doing a bit of python programming.
Python is high level enough to be mostly platform independent- it's an utter joy when my programme on a windows box will also run on linux.



Thinking i might do some data manipulation and export from Strava.

 

[DCBassman]

Latest kit: late 2009 27" iMac, Core 2 Duo 3.06 GHz, 4GB RAM. Previous owner has botched Mac OS High Sierra and it won't boot. Stuffed a usb drive with Linux Mint 21.1 in, and it installed a nd runs perfectly except it doesn't like the Apple Magic Mouse. No great loss, plenty of spare mice...
60 squids.

 

[DCBassman]

Just because: spent most of today finding, burning to USB drive (using several different drives and programs), and finally, installing MacOS High Sierra. All running as it should, very nice. Even bigger bargain now despite time spent!

 

[DCBassman]

Oh, and the supplied mouse is in fact a wireless Mighty Mouse, proper Apple vintage, along with my already owned A1048 keyboard.

 

[MrGrumpy]

Anyone fitted an SSD as a replacement HD for CCTV recorder ? Current drive is 3.5” Sata . Usually specialist drives fitted not just any drive ? However heat is a particular problem for me due to location , so looking for something more suitable .

 

[HMS_Dave]

Anyone fitted an SSD as a replacement HD for CCTV recorder ? Current drive is 3.5” Sata . Usually specialist drives fitted not just any drive ? However heat is a particular problem for me due to location , so looking for something more suitable .

Technically, you can use any HDD or SSD according to your manufacturers recommendations. I know there are HDD specifically sold for CCTV systems, but it is only their recommended use. In my Dad's CCTV system, i put him a server grade HDD from 2008 in it and it still works perfectly.

 

[MrGrumpy]

Technically, you can use any HDD or SSD according to your manufacturers recommendations. I know there are HDD specifically sold for CCTV systems, but it is only their recommended use. In my Dad's CCTV system, i put him a server grade HDD from 2008 in it and it still works perfectly.

Server grade isn’t normal neither though ! I’m guessing some or low heat possibly ?! SSD makes sense from that perspective . I’ll see what’s about , current drive was on its way out within the first year till I removed the case from the PVR due to overheating? However it’s crapped out a couple of times , formatted and got it going again . Not ruled out the Swann DVR thing is just rank rotten !

 

[HMS_Dave]

Server grade isn’t normal neither though ! I’m guessing some or low heat possibly ?! SSD makes sense from that perspective . I’ll see what’s about , current drive was on its way out within the first year till I removed the case from the PVR due to overheating? However it’s crapped out a couple of times , formatted and got it going again . Not ruled out the Swann DVR thing is just rank rotten !

I should point out that I got a box of those HDDs for next to nothing.
It's hard to say if the problem you're experiencing is HDD related. Even consumer grade HDD are fairly robust and stand up to heat, in my experience HDDs are more susceptible to physical knocks and bangs than heat... I'd be tempted to get a HDD as cheap as possible, second hand even to rule it out.

 

[MrGrumpy]

Definitely doesn’t get banged about ! I’ll see what I can find lying about . Son 1 may have a spare ?