Had a user call reporting their computer shutting off suddenly. On reboot, they received the message "On last operation CPU reported a thermal event" Well.. This told me that the CPU fan had probably choked and the CPU had overheated causing the PC shut down. Upon inspection I found my initial thought was only partially correct. The CPU had overheated, that was obvious, because the heat sync below the fan was completely clogged with dust... or a small feline, I'm not sure which. BUT, The fan … [Read more...]
To Clean? or Not To Clean?!?
This is another post that got lost in the WordPress conversion. A good friend of mine called me a few weeks back having trouble with his modem..... I know, that title and first line probably remind you of one of those jokes... A horse, Rabbit, and Turtle went into a bar... Anyway, we had just had a large set of storms here in town and this was really of no surprise as I had been playing fix-it already that day. Turns out that lightning had come in on his phone line and fried his modem... … [Read more...]
Online Backups: Mozy
I have to say that my initial impression of Mozy Backup was not that great. Besides the abundance of outgoing bandwidth at my server the initial backup was very slow. I was only sending up a little over 1.5 gig of data and, it took the better part of a day to complete. But, now that I think about it more, that was actually a good thing. That way the first backup does not totally consume your outgoing pipe. Well, no sooner than my initial backup was complete, I needed to restore some data. In … [Read more...]
Online Back-ups
Well, after great thought and study, I've decided to go with Mozy as my online back-up choice. I've set up the account and have installed the clients. One server and one desktop client. My server has a tremendous amount of bandwidth so, I thought I would do it's initial back-up first. So far I'm not real happy with the transfer speeds but I am transferring 1.6 gig worth of data so I will reserve judgment until it completes. After my initial back-ups complete, I will attempt … [Read more...]
Online Back-UP Services
I am interested in another layer of back-up for my important files and have considered trying one of the online back-up services. There seem to be a quite a few out there and most of them offer a free version, paid personal, and business. Anyone have any experience with these??? IDrive-E free:2GB of storage space absolutely free Option to upgrade to the IDrive-E Pro version depending on user requirements remote backup features remote backup signup remote backup drive:Ideal for small and … [Read more...]
Vista Ready?!
Ok.. I'm ready. I have a machine built and Vista Ultimate installed. I used the following hardware for this new PC: ASUS P5W64-WS Professional Motherboard Intel 2.4 ghz Core2Duo Processor 2 Gig Kingston DDR2 800mhz RAM ASUS 7900 GS (NVidia) Video adapter Plextor PX-755SA Dual Layer DVD/CD writer Two Western Digital 500 gig SATA drives in RAID 1 I chose the ASUS board because of the 1066 mhz Front side Bus and DDR2 800 mhz RAM support. And, because I like ASUS, their boards are … [Read more...]
Computer Locked up?
Everyone's seen it... You are surfing the web or working on a project for work when.... Everything Freezes up! AAAAARRRRGGGG... (no, this isnt an ad for Geek Squad!). What caused it? Spyware? Virus? Cheese? It's really hard to tell. Lots of things can cause the dreaded "Freeze". After cursing furiously, you reboot and continue your work..(if you were a good boy/girl and actually saved it!?) But what caused it???? When this starts happening, think about what may have changed lately.. Did … [Read more...]