Early Morning

      Most people like to wake up to the smell of coffee, read a newspaper, check out the news online, perhaps stretch a little, maybe even have sex and that's a great way to start the day. But for me ..honestly speaking there's nothing better than a panic attack and a great feeling of dread, to get you out of bed.

      Besides waking up with a headache ( as usual) today I also woke up to find that my PC was not working. On turning it on it would simply stand by, with both fans at max power and do nothing.  My first thought was that there might be something wrong the the CPU ..in which case I was screwed. But after about 30 seconds the motherboard ( Asus P5KC) beeped. One long beep followed by 3 short ones. That was a decent sign for me, so I got out my handy "Beep codes and you" manual ( i'm kidding I got the mb's manual) and found out that one long beep followed by 3 shorter ones means there is no VGA input. So the video card was to blame( nVidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512). Now this may have also screwed me, because upon adding the second fan to my GPU aka ..opening it up I had lost my warranty. I checked the connections, the wires and everything because it's easy to dislodge the board out of it's proper place, but there was nothing wrong.  I then proceeded to taking it out, and putting it back in. Fortunately that worked and everything came back to normal...almost. Because after I booted Windows i quickly got a BSOD, but it seems it only was a one-time event. Now I'm off to have my coffee. Cheers

Macgyvering Around

Wohoo Oh my God ..it's great to write this. I've had a truly great day in such a geeky fashion.  First of all ..I was asked a few days ago to get together a few pieces to try and make a decent computer out of them that would last for another 3-4 years.  So I put on my " buy geeky stuff"� hat ..and got together an Asus P5QL-PRO, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.8 Ghz and a Gigabyte GeForce 9600GT GPU. This was only the beginning of everything.

I came back home with  everything and started assembling them. I had no box, so I just put them together on the floor to see if everything checks out and to install Windows. Unfortunately I had no more money to buy RAM so I'm just using my old cards which are 2x Geil 512 ~ 667. So only 1 gig of RAM and Windows 7 still runs excellent, I'm really hyped about it.

When I started to piece everything together I realized I had only one power source powerful enough to get everything running and that was inside my own computer. So I took apart my own PC which was kind of painful to do ..mostly because nothing really fits the way it should inside the box and it's all macgyvered together. Anyway I took out my power source and installed Win 7 on the new PC.

Meanwhile a friend of mine was playing around with my own GPU Asus nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 512. And we got to talking about how it gets really hot ( it idles at 70C) and the box that I have is in no way helping and how there should be a second fan on it.  Then, noticing I actually did have a spare fan around, we reckoned we should do our best to fit it on the card. Now ..the next part of the story is told in pictures so bear with me.

This was what we were trying to do: to fit the fan on the left on the radiator of the GPU after we had taken out the plastic part that belonged to Asus.

We cut through the plastic with a heated blade, making an air intake.

Meanwhile my own PC seeing what we were doing to the poor card had begun to "turn into monster"

After almost 2 hours ..yes that's how long it took us to cut through that useless plastic, this was the end result. A double fanned GPU. And though it may not look much ..that little fan actually keeps my card 20 degrees cooler, maxing out at 61C after 2 hours or heavy ultra graphics gaming. Yeap, that was my day and I have to say I had tons of fun with it. Cheers