| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Community
Forum: Chat Room
Thread: Looking for recommendations for new motherboard |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 39
|
|
| Author |
|
|
twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I'm sticking with Seagate too, but I do have to give WD props (proper respect) for having good tech support. I was on hold for less than 5 minutes. I read the serial number off of the front of the drive (was conveniently placed to be viewable without uninstalling) and they promptly told me it was under warranty and they would issue the RMA. They even gave me the option of doing a cross ship without charging my credit card. I just wait for the new drive, pack the old one in the box, attach the mailing label and I'm done. They pay for shipping of the new drive but you have to pay the return shipping. It should only be a couple bucks though so I don't really mind.
----------------------------------------I like the "smoke" theory of computer physics. It's amazing how they can squeeze so much smoke into those little chips. When I mentioned Costco, I was thinking of their web site. They have a much better selection than my local store - by at least a couple orders of magnitude. If you really want to fry a chip, you need to wear a latex suit and rub yourself with a long-haired cat first. Uhhh, that didn't come out the way I expected it would.   |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Ugh, the weekend is over and I have to travel tomorrow! All the joys of working...
I never thought of checking out Costco online. The store I go to has a pretty good selection, but I never thought the online store would have more. I try not to think too hard, it might start hurting. Good deal WD treated you nicely. They probably want to keep your cash flowing in the next hard drive purchase. Speaking of the frying of chips, I ran across this link on youtube. Pretty cool if you want to find a nice way to destroy processors. And anything around them for that matter. On a lighter note, my sister-in-law bought a new laptop this weekend for her off-to-college this fall spending spree, and I convinced her to let me play with it this weekend. I'm not so sure I like Vista. Way too annoying with the cancel or allow messages. I wonder if there is a way to turn that off. I was able to get BOINC up and running on it as a service, although every time I reboot when it tries to load Boinc Manager Vista blocks it. I just took it out of the start menu since as a service it is already kicking up 100% of the idle time. I wanted to use the UD agent (gasp!) for the smoothness of the thread limiting. I never did get it to work and since it is a C2D I trashed UD and went to BOINC on it. After playing with the throttle and listening to the processor fan respond almost in unison to the processor rev up and down, I decided to do the better thing for the processor fan and leave it at a nice 100% (so it won't wear the fan out from throttling of course  ). What amazes me is these C2D laptops (I recently acquired one at work for travel also, but with XP Pro) do not seem to push a lot of air even at 100%. Intel must have really done their homework on heat dissipation after the flop with the Prescott processors just about melting they get so hot. I just set the preferences to do work after 5 min of idle time, and of course to suspend for battery life since she will be taking it to classes. All in all a nice laptop. It's a Sony Vaio with the 1.8GHz C2D with 2GB ram and 200GB hard drive. I still like my Dell at work better. I tried to get her to buy a Dell but she wanted it "Like, right now!" Oh well, I won't complain. I got to mess with Vista and add another cruncher to my fleet, at least for a little bit. I might suspend the activity on it while she is away at college so she don't screw anything up on it. |
||
|
|
Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
Hi Joneill003,
----------------------------------------you wrote: .... I'm not so sure I like Vista. Way too annoying with the cancel or allow messages. I wonder if there is a way to turn that off. I was able to get BOINC up and running on it as a service, although every time I reboot when it tries to load Boinc Manager Vista blocks it. I just took it out of the start menu since as a service it is already kicking up 100% of the idle time. I wanted to use the UD agent (gasp!) for the smoothness of the thread limiting. I never did get it to work and since it is a C2D I trashed UD and went to BOINC on it. After playing with the throttle and listening to the processor fan respond almost in unison to the processor rev up and down, I decided to do the better thing for the processor fan and leave it at a nice 100% (so it won't wear the fan out from throttling of course ).The BOINC default 60% throttle alternation (3 seconds on, 2 seconds off) does potentially harm the fan on laptops.... Didactylos noted that 50% is best as 1 second alternating would not cause this effect. Until BOINC comes with a smooth throttle, recommend using Threadmaster as throttle add on for windows >= W2K, but have yet to find a willing tester to put it on Vista.... very ready to talk you thru how to set the parms (I wrote a 'how to ' post before becoming CA, so start there if you can and found recently another write-up: Using ThreadMaster to Tame Rogue Applications ). As for your install/run problems on Vista, did spend considerable time collecting the How To: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=12856. Point 1 is by far the simplest solution either for BOINC or WCG(UD) agent. Let me know cheers
WCG
Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hey Sekerob,
----------------------------------------Thanks for the info on threadmaster. I'll have to give that a try. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I did mess with the throttle feature in BOINC but didn't like the fan responses. I don't think I tried 50%, I'll have to try that if I can't get threadmaster to work. Has anyone tried threadmaster on Vista I wonder? The How To guide for Vista was really nice, I looked it over quite a bit this weekend. I did install BOINC to C:\BOINC and it works great. Vista doesn't like to auto start BoincMGR for some reason, but since it is installed as a service it still works. Maybe that is why it doesn't like to start Boinc Manager since it is a service and Vista is so annoying. I don't think I even tried installing as a single user. I took Boinc manager out of the startup folder and won't worry about it. That way it gets rid of another icon down in the task bar, even though it is still running in the background. I added BOINC to the DEP exceptions and made sure Windows Defender allows access, and of course I changed the waittokillservice reg value to 60 seconds. After shutdown and startup it keeps going where it left off, so no errors. I'm not sure why UD wouldn't work for me but I enjoy BOINC much more and that was the first time I got to look at 5.10.7. Looks a little different, but no huge differences that I saw. Thanks again for the info on threadmaster. Hopefully I can try that out before I head out on my trip tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes. PS whats up with the internal server errors? WCG trying to kick me off?  [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Jun 25, 2007 2:05:35 PM] |
||
|
|
Sekerob
Ace Cruncher Joined: Jul 24, 2005 Post Count: 20043 Status: Offline |
The error 500? knreed posted somewhere that the website server resets at regular intervals, for yet to discover reasons.
----------------------------------------I ask you to volunteer TM on Vista, because i have no access to that OS and i wont use it till probably SP3. The Free upgrade coupon turned out to be 20 Euro, and absent my abilities and Vista's known poor cohabitation in dual boot , I just leave the disk in it's still shrink wrapped package. Asked around and searched the internet to no avail only to find my own posts asking LOL Here an excerpt from a preamble to the above Rogue article: http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=4560 Terminal services administrators are faced with many challenges, none greater than supporting applications that attempt to monopolize the CPU resources on a given server. ThreadMaster provides a method to control a rogue application that is both easy and free. Many applications that are deployed via Terminal Services were just not written for a multi-user environment. Although there can be many different issues facing Terminal Server administrators, taming a CPU-intensive application can be one of the more interesting challenges. Tame it too much and the application performance can become too sluggish. Give it too much freedom and the performance for all users on the particular server could be affected. There are several third party tools and utilities available to address this concern; but ThreadMaster may be able to accomplish this without adding to the price tag of your Terminal Services deployment. This article demonstrates the use of ThreadMaster and the value this freeware utility could bring to your environment.
WCG
Please help to make the Forums an enjoyable experience for All! |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I'll be more than happy to check out TM on Vista. As soon as I can get my hands back on that laptop. I'll post when I get around to trying. As for Vista, I agree. I don't see any reason to upgrade from XP Pro at the moment. It does everything I need for now. I was unaware of Vista not playing well with dual-boot setups. Good information to know. Thanks.
|
||
|
|
twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
Speaking of the frying of chips, I ran across this link on youtube. Pretty cool if you want to find a nice way to destroy processors. And anything around them for that matter. I've never watched anything on youtube and most of my computers don't even have flash installed - i absolutely hate animation on web pages - especially flash animation. But thank you anyway. On a lighter note, my sister-in-law bought a new laptop this weekend for her off-to-college this fall spending spree, and I convinced her to let me play with it this weekend. I'm not so sure I like Vista. Way too annoying with the cancel or allow messages. I wonder if there is a way to turn that off. I'm not touching Vista until the first service patch comes out. I have some issues with boinc that I won't go into. I'll just say that if she isn't able to troubleshoot problems on her own, at least make sure she knows how to uninstall the software if she has any problems with it. I had to get boinc off of my fiancee's laptop and substitute UD agent. Of course she only has 512mb of memory. On a new machine you/she should be ok. I just don't think boinc is a good app for people that aren't tech savvy since when something goes wrong they're going to have to troubleshoot it - and there are already enough problems that come up in a windows environment - especially a new o/s like Vista. Don't know much about laptops since I've never had a need for one. I had a wlan enabled pda with over-the-air internet access via the cell phone carrier and it was a complete waste of money for me. I do have a good story about the laptop I was talking about before though. I wanted to get more memory for it - get it up to at least 1024mb. It's a mini laptop by Averatec. After a bunch of phone calls (including Averatec - who were of no help) I found a website that detailed the process. Turns out that you have to almost completely disassemble the thing to get at the memory slots - what a nightmare. I finally installed a utility that reclaims and compresses memory (freeramxp pro - free utility) and although the machine is a little sluggish coming back from the UD screensaver, it now seems to work as well as ever. I was a good thing that I partially disassembled the laptop though - while searching for the memory slots. The heatsink was almost completely clogged. I pulled out a strip of gunk that looked like old-fashioned horsehair carpet padding. I was amazed, especially since it's only about a year old and almost never travels anywhere. |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Yeah I know what you mean about annoyances of taking laptops apart. I just don't do it anymore. Unless you can take a screw out on the bottom and pop another stick of ram into it. Taking the keyboard out and everything else for that matter is just too much of a pain.
On the vista laptop, I took Sekerob's advise and tried the 50% throttle and it did ok, although when I get back from out of town I am going to look into threadmaster. I tried installing it last night but it kept giving a bunch of stupid errors. I took a screenshot of the dos window but I don't know how to post jpegs in the forums. If I did I would post it here. The errors went over my head and I didn't have too much time to mess with it, plus my ISP went down at around the same time so I couldn't go online and research anything. Vista is just such a pain. I would love to just throw XP Pro on there for her. I messed with threadmaster on one of my XP Pro machines and it worked perfectly the first time. I just had to go back into the registry and set the throttle back up to 100% since it is just an internet machine and does nothing useful unless it is crunching. I just wanted to mess with vista since there was all the hype, but I am definitely not upgrading. It's just a more annoying Windows OS if you ask me, constantly being paranoid that something is trying to do something on the machine, even though I just clicked the application to run it manually. This thread has sidetracked a little since its original postings. It's all good. Thats why they call it a chatroom. Sekerob, if you're out there reading posts I'll play with Vista more whenever I can get around to it, hopefully this weekend since I am taking a mini vacation with the July 4th weekend coming next week. Happy Birthday to ME! My sisters still resent the fact that I ruined the 4th of July cookout by being born right in the middle of it. LOL. The youtube link is pretty good. One of my friends sent it to me. I rarely go to that site, but that one was pretty good. Some idiots decide to take a heat sink off an AMD Duron processor and it vaporizes, and they catch it on camera of course. |
||
|
|
cargod01
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Apr 25, 2007 Post Count: 508 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
When installing BOINC or UD Agent in Vista, don't install in the default location.
----------------------------------------Vista doesn't play nice with anything trying to write to a folder in Program Files. I uninstalled BOINC & reinstalled it in a different directory & my errors went away. I have been playing with Vista throughout the BETA phase, RC phase and now RTM. I think it is design by committee & they missed the mark by a wide margin. It reminds me of AOL software... limited ability to customize and always trying to protect you from yourself. You can disable the User Access Control (all those allow prompts) in Vista, but it breaks other functions. Whoever designed that must think we're all 6 year olds.....     |
||
|
|
|