Jakub Anderwald

Due to recent Starcraft 2 beta release, I started playing 3D games more often (almost daily, I must say). However, one problem appeared: my graphics card was overheating. I measured the temperature and it was going up to 110 degrees, then the game was slowing down making it hard to play.

I did some research on the GeForce 8800 GTS I am using and it turned out that:
1/ I am running those cards way too hot, even when idling.
2/ They tend to overheat, especially when they don’t have enough airflow.

As I have quite a dense environment with two GPUs, the overheating was understandable.

After some gooling, I found a custom cooler ZEROtherm Hurricane HC92 Cu 8800 to provide the best cooling results, but it was quite loud. I read some reviews of other 3rd-party coolers and they weren’t that effective, so I got the Zerotherm. Just notice, it will consume 2 additional PCI slots below you GPU, be prepared for that.

It came in a nice box, with installation manual (with miniature images, so I downloaded the PDF version to see them better) and all the required stuff. Unfortunately, I also got a dried-out thermal grease, so had to buy a new one in a nearby store.

The whole operation took around 1 hour. Here’s the toolset (thanks to my girlfriend for having the nail polish remover)

First step is to remove the OEM cooler from the card. There’s a lot of screws for that, also at the end you have to detach it from the GPU with some force Once you feel it moves on the GPU surface freely, it means it’s kept only by the thermal grease and you can pull it off safely. Then you get some alcohol- or acetone-based fluid and clean off the old grease from card. The results should look like this:

Then you stick all the small heatsinks onto memory chips, NVIO (with extra help from two plastic mounting legs) and FETs. The manual says here

Do not apply excessive force until the adhesive tape of the memory heat sink is completely attached.

which got me a bit confused, whether shall I apply excessive force after it’s attached or not. I decided not to try braking my card in half, but left the heatsinks movable a bit. They didn’t fall off, so I guess it’s OK.

Then you mount the central module with heat pipes and fan. Just remember to remove the transparent sticky tape from the copper base. I forgot to do it and had to remove the module again and add some more thermal grease. At least I realized before starting the card up!

Then you just need to mount the card back into your PC, find some space around it and you’re done!

There’s also a wired fan speed controller, which you need to place somewhere. I put it on top of my DVD recorder, so it’s accessible without opening the case, and not spoiling the looks.

So, how does it work?

Idle temperature fell down from around 75 degrees to 60. During gaming it’s between 75 (on maximum fan speed) and 90 (on lowest fan speed).

However, what’s more important – the binary result is “it worked”. I can now play games at maximum details and the card doesn’t overheat. I don’t really care if it’s 5 degrees higher or lower, I do care if I can use my card at full performance. Yes, I can – so this was a good investment.

A friend of mine asked me for help recently.

His new Windows 7 laptop could not authenticate to access a network share in a workgroup environment. I said “that’s going to be easy” and ran him through the usual troubleshooting – security logs, share permissions and maximum number of users, password synchronisation etc.. By the time all seemed fine and he said that he already reinstalled the OS on the laptop twice, and that all other machines are working fine with the same share and same username, I realised it’s not one of the “usual suspects”.

After enabling the correct logging procedures, we got two nice failed events in security log on the server – 680 and 529. Based on my experience, event 529 never lies. You can tell with all the certainty in the world, that when a user gets event 529, he made a mistake in his password, there is no other explaination. Well, I’ll have to revise that policy.

Password was set to “1234″ for both accounts and we still got the same error. I had to go to office, so I told him to move the hard drive from the new machine to one of the older ones. I came back couple hours later and saw an IM message from him waiting for me. “DAMN, it worked.”

Reason? Failed motherboard.

Somehow it could connect to the Internet, could browse local network, but failed at authenticating a local account.

Don’t ask me how.

Following the examples of Larry Page, Bill Gates and Jeff Atwood I just bought myself 2 additional 21 inch displays.

I can finally keep my email always open (on the left-hand side monitor), put IM communicator, desktop widgets and other trivia stuff to the right-hand side one and be focused on my main task. I had to precisely choose the side displays for my setup, so they match the resolution, physical dimensions (at least visible screen height) and color quality of the center one, which I already had.

I use two NECs at work, so having 3 monitors should be better, right? It is. I don’t have the small gap in front of me, just a wide 24″, 1920×1200 area waiting for me to do something.

I have reinstalled Vista on my primary computer some time ago. I was still missing one device installed – Mustek BearPaw 2400TA Plus – because there are no official drivers for Windows Vista. I’m running a 32-bit Enterprise flavour of Vista, so previously I had the Windows 2000/XP drivers installed with some registry hack and it quite worked. However, when I tried to find that information now, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Finally, after more than hour of googling, I found a way to do it. I’ll just make a note here for myself or anyone else who would like to do the same trick and find that information faster.

Here we go:

1. Download 2000 / XP drivers for your scanner
2. Change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProductName registry key to say “Microsoft Windows 2000″
3. Reboot Vista and start it in Safe Mode
4. Install the drivers, they should now install fine
5. Reboot Vista, start normally. After logging in, it will ask you if you want to use an unsigned driver – agree

That’s it – everything should be working more or less normally. I just tried that and it works for me – this trick should work for all XP / 2000 drivers.

Yesterday I upgraded my display for the Big One to a 24-inch Gateway FPD2485W. It’s a S-PVA, Pivotable large display that really makes sense to watch movies on.

My previous display was Sharp LL-T1811W, a regular TFT-TN 18″ LCD display. Such an upgrade always gives me the “wow”, since I upgraded from a two-class-behind equipment. This is what I intend to write about – your hardware upgrade policy.

We all have ou beloved machines. We tweak them one way or another. We play with them. We sometimes talk to them and yes, they speak back. Of course we all need to keep them in good shape and the best way to do it is to make sure they’re not running on outdated hardware, old technologies and don’t have unnecessary constraints. And that pays back – we’re not frustrated when something runs slowly, we don’t have those “too little memory” errors and we don’t hear our drives constantly scratching for the swap file. We simply use them without problems.

It comes with a cost, though. That’s why we cannot (well, maybe some of you can – I can’t) afford to replace our hardware whenever a new generation / feature comes in. We have to settle down on one of the two policies:

Early adopter. You buy new equipment quite often. Sometimes just after it’s been released, but mostly when you read some reviews of it and make sure it’s worth upgrading. You can sell your previous equipment for a reasonable amount of money.

Every couple years. You replace your equipment only when it brakes, stops working or is unbereably slow and frustrating. Usually your old equipment is not worth a penny when get rid of it.

Of course these are two examples, your behaviours will be somewhere between one and another. I compared the costs of each methodology and they’re not that different, surprisingly. When you’re replacing your hardware that’s relatively new, you can sell it and get more than 70% of price of the new hardware, so you’re just paying up for the difference. On the other hand, most of your couple-years-old hardware can only be sold for little to nothing on eBay or similar auction systems, or just given as a gift to your family, friends. So you have to pay the full price for almost every upgrade. Of course your mileage may vary.

I personally prefer to upgrade only when needed – the biggest difference is the “wow” factor here. Two or three years in IT make a dramatic difference, so when you upgrade your stuff after that time, you’ll mostly see all the pros and little of the cons. And you don’t have to spend 2 weeks choosing and reading reviews for the things you want to buy – you can simply compare their declarative parameters, read two-three trusted reviews to make sure it’s not a dead-end product line, and you simply buy itfrom your local shop. Or order it on eBay.

This way I can gloat over my new display / drive / DVD recorder with a peace of mind, not worring if I could choose the “10 bucks more expensive, with 1 extra feature” competitor – I’m usually overwhelmed by the difference between my new toy and the old one.