July 12, 2005
by dhoytt
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Cleared Garage For Workouts

I cleared enough space in the garage for workouts on the weights. I am still in the process of getting more things out of the house to get room in the garage permanently!!
One thing at a time though!

July 9, 2005
by dhoytt
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Trees Planted & Hard Drives Moved To Next Primary System

The last pines was cut down and my Oaks are planted, prepped with the plant food is mixed in the soil. I only had to stake the Valley Oak. The Bur Oak was a bit more mature and had a stronger trunk.
Both tress I had left in the pots the past week and were a bit dry because they were dropped off earlier than I expected and could not get the time to plant them.
The Bur Oak’s roots had gone through the bottom of the planting pot so I had to cut the pot off.
The biggest issue was digging through and weeding all of the roots from the trees I had cut down.
I gave them a generous watering without turning it into a swamp and with the food I left in the soil plus the food tablet from the Sacramento Tree Foundation and constantly keeping the trees watered I should be able to resuscitate them.
I am also closer to making my new system the primary system once I move all of my critical data to the drives. I moved one of my drives I took off of my music server and placed it on my new system. I moved the drives to the place they will be permanently on the system until my next hardware upgrade! Most of the applications are already loaded and everything is working fine.
I will post my old system and new system specs later. I am however moving from a 478 P4 to an AMD 64 bit system with an Adaptec 39160 and some screaming drives. The new system is very fast!

July 9, 2005
by dhoytt
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Finishing Projects

I will finally get my trees into the dirt Saturday that SMUD and the
Sacramento Tree Foundation http://www.sactree.com/ left me.

Hopefully I didn’t wait too long but I wanted my last pine tree cut down so that
the trees that I got from the Sacramento Tree Foundation wouldn’t be injured
from the tree getting chopped down. I usually have a good green thumb but it
will be tested having the tress in the pots this long.

I will completed that project and then will eye a few other things like
finishing the transition pieces between the rooms.

I am going to place a screen/security door for my French doors off the master
bedroom so I can have a nice breeze at night and during the day without letting
bugs in.

June 28, 2005
by dhoytt
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Getting Busy

Now’s the time I finally have my weekends to start finishing up my projects and bringing them to completion. Everything is just rolling along and then its time to really start making some #&*$ing noise. Watch the smoke and that’s what’s going to be showing from the ruins because you know that when the fire’s at its hottest the smoke is at a minimum.

May 22, 2005
by dhoytt
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Lesson Learned Blow Out Dust From CPU Fan to Avoid Over Heating

 Well this was strange. My main system I use kept
periodically shutting down for no apparent reason. I checked for the usual
virus, what was running on the system at time of shutdown etc…

There was no pattern to the
shutdowns. I had the latest virus protection and had upgraded my Windows XP Pro
to the latest levels of updates. I looked in the event logs and saw some
references to the video driver so I downloaded and started to update the video
driver. During the video driver update the system cut-off again!

 Well this time it would not boot
all the way back up but kept cutting off before the system could complete the
bios load. After a while it did not boot at all!! The system stopped even
powering up!

 I then went and got a spare power
supply I had not used in a while and that also failed to power the system up.
This is when I started smelling the aroma of burnt silicon. My next step was to
promptly unplug my system and power supply. I tried a few more items but since
it was late (3am) I went to bed.

Now this is what really threw me
down the wrong path is that when I woke up and came into my computer room My
hubs, routers and system in my 19” rack where down. My UPS I had bought at a
computer swap would not come back up! I unplugged everything and went to the old
standby surge protectors. My systems and hubs came back up.

Since I have had issues with power
the past few months and had moved things around and considerably reconfigured
the power structure in the room I figured this was a contributing factor to my
system failure.

That day at lunch I purchased
another 550w ATX power supply. Tracking down my power supply manufacture of the
power supply I thought had failed produced another side story. The company’s web
site listed on the side of the box was not active and they had no address or
other information about the company on or in the box! I had to go to the store
and convince the place I had bought the power supply from seven months ago to
call their buyers of the power supply and get the number to the company I had
bought the power supply from! Even the current boxes on the stores shelves had
the unreachable website and no other company information!! I called the company
and they had changed the companies URL but had no other information on the web
site listed on all their power supplies currently in the stores pointing to the
new site or anything about the company! More to come on this issue later!

Now the real craziness begins. I
took the power supply home and of course was met with the same results as
before. The system would chirp quickly not even spin the system fans one
revolution and quit!

            I then thought well
maybe it was some other device but after isolating the system to its barest
components just to see if the CPU fans would spin I thought I had either a
faulty mother board or a failed CPU.

A couple of days later I went and
purchased a new mother board & CPU along with memory. The new configuration
powered up fine with my power supply.  Problem solved correct?? Well during this
time I had decided to try and trouble shoot my old mother board again and see if
it was just bad memory since I felt maybe I needed to blow out all my part and
reseat everything and presto my original mother board powered up!! Ok I’m out of
a little money but happy. I started building up my old system in the case after
blowing it out with canned air. I then tried to power it back up and the thing
started cutting off on me again when I got into the OS. Then after a while each
time it would cut off a little quicker.

            Now I made sure that everything was properly
connected and seated in the case and in the respective connections and still the
system kept cutting off.  I again started isolating components to determine the
issue. I then noticed that I had failed to clean one item and since I had the
canned air I decided to correct this issue and buy me some time to think.

 I took out the CPU fan which
looked like it had a fine layer of dust on it off the CPU. I looked at the CPU
and noticed that in the fins of the heat sync with the fan on top was more dust
than I anticipated! I blew all of the dust out of the CPU fan and placed it back
on the system. Surprise of all surprises the system came up and has not shut
down since. This has only been 24 hours but it would not even stay up for all my
systems to load when it hadn’t been powered up after the system was cooled down.
When not cooled down it would not even power up!

Now I looked at the design of the
whole CPU cooling apparatus. Basically the CPU fan is drawing air to cool the
CPU into the heat sinks and if any dust particles are in the air it was getting
trapped against the CPU and motherboard! This is an Intel 3.2 GB P4 478 pin
system but I imagine this may happen to many other CPU’s.

Now I will build my AMD 64 bit
3200 system and move the 3.2 GB to one of my other systems as I said in the post
before eventually but now I can wait a bit and take my time and work on other
projects.

The lesson learned CLEAN and BLOW
OUT the CPU FAN otherwise it can cause your CPU to OVERHEAT!!

 

May 19, 2005
by dhoytt
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Main system bites the Dust!!

My system I built just in October bit the dust!! I cannot remember any of my dozens of systems I have built for myself or the 100’s I have built for others ever doing like this!! I knew an older hard drive I was using as a boot drive needed changing but a SCSI drive you can ride for a while since it will move the data off bad sectors.
What happened was the last week the system kept cutting off for no apparent reason. There were no error messages in the event logs besides some data referring to the video card. So in the middle of updating the video drivers the system bites it for good.
Well now I’ going for a screaming no holds bar system!! I already have the Adaptec 39160 and a Seagate SCSI 73GB 10k rpm hard drive for a boot drive. I will add a 146 GB 10k rpm SCSI HD.
This will go along with maybe another 36 GB and 50 GB SCSI hard drives already on the system and replace 2 other 36 GB drives and my 47 GB drive on that system.
I am going to go with a 64 bit CPU on this build. When I get my warranty replacement parts for what went out on the system I will use that to build and replace one of my Linux systems or it may become a windows backup music server or test windows system.
The data is good and in shape so no issues there. Now with the beauty of SCSI I can have all 8 drives connected while I transfer data. I need to reduce the number of spindles on this system any way. I was just hoping to save this task for later and also benefit from the new CPU’s coming out in a few months time.
Oh well another thing to accomplish in the long list that will push a few projects out a bit.

May 12, 2005
by dhoytt
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Still Down Sizing and Improving House

The computer room is totally reconfigured! I have two portable stations on wheels for my laptops and their peripherals. I moved my main system to one corner and consolidated my two racks into one and placed that in the closet and added the tape library in the rack as well. I placed one of my UNIX systems in the closet unracked to run the library since it has a nice differential interface but I may decide to run the library with Windows or Linux instead.
I also moved my large screen TV out of the living room into the den where it actually looks better. I think I will also move my bar into the den. I am thinking of having the living room host to my vinyl turntables since placing them on a table in the computer room ends up crowding the room. I’m also going to place the dart board in the living room and possibly a futball table. I moved the smaller TV and entertainment set into the living room and will move the bookshelf with my vinyl albums in the living room as well.
I am looking to place another couch and beanbag type seating in the den as well.
Then outside need to get the front garden in order and weed the vegetable garden I put in. Now the pool is in shape and I need to decide if I should start a pool service. I think I will since that will free me from that since I have so much to do now.
Well we will see how it goes since I have not had a day off since November except Christmas & New Years day.
I still then need to tile the kitchen and bathrooms and trim a few places of the hardwood.

April 12, 2005
by dhoytt
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Late Night Snack, Shrimp & Crab

Going to pick up a few items at the grocery and spotted snow & alaskan crabs and couldn’t resist making a late night seafood snack! Shrimp crabs boiled in red pepper seasoning and dipped in garlic butter!!! With slow/mellow jams playing in the ears and topped with a nice scotch!