Posts filed under 'Hardware'
LCD monitors are everywhere these days. Almost everyone is using one at home, in the office or at their home studio. However not many people, aside from professional artists, know much about LCD technology and how to get the best possible image. For instance, what use for a good picture quality might a general office worker need other than a clear screen with good brightness and contrast? They need to be able to read the text on the screen without undue eye strain and LCDs offer that in spades, even the very worse of them.
However, unlike professional artists, computer geeks like myself want a good overall image from their LCD monitors since their use is more about text legibility. Photos, video, games, all these are vastly more enjoyable with a good overall image quality and many of us try to get it. There are many ways to do it, some free (special image collections to tune the monitor), some inexpensive (like the Spyder 3 in all its versions – google link for it) or downright expensive.
I have never bought a calibrator for myself but I have over the years used many image collections to fine-tune the display. However I have recently come across an online collection that surpasses everything I have EVER seen.
Point your browsers to The Lagom LCD monitor test pages and be amazed at all that it can do for your LCD monitor. After having completed its tests I am amazed at how much better my display has become. Also don’t be afraid to fiddle with values that you think are wrong, for instance I have been using a 80 contrast, 55 brightness, 0 gamma for a very long time now, but after using this website I have gone to a 55 contrast, 60 brightness, -50 gamma. Simply amazing.
One case of warning; those tests will also point out some severe limitations of the LCD technology used in MANY monitors these days, specifically the inability of the TN monitors to provide uniform colour across the monitor. It is the price to pay for cheaper but faster TN technology over the pricier but slower IPS.
May 23rd, 2010
Like so many before me, I wanted to add more drives in the WHS system. So far I have been using the XFX Revo64 in JBOD mode, however I have recently started doubting this small but powerful card- for one, RAID eats up at your drives MTBF as it tries to check HDD stability over a set interval, it also check the drives while in JBOD and finally it just reported two drives as failed which upon moving them to my main system and checked with manufacturer diagnostic tool proved to be 100% healthy.
Hence I have decided to go for an extremely plain SATA controller in the form of a SI3114 controller providing 4 SATA ports. In my naiveté I believed that since this is a very simple piece of kit it would be a simple matter to install and extend my SATA drive capacity. The hubris…
The problems I encountered were in the following order:
1) Card needs drivers, drivers in the CD were not compatible, none of them, tried them all.
2) Downloaded drivers from a generic driver site that had served me well. They did not work.
3) Tried to find the Silicon Image drivers from the company’s site. I could not find them for one minute of looking so I gave up.
From that point on I tried other things, looked for a new system to house my WHS with a focus on multiple SATA ports in the MB, found some promising options too. However my budget was not up to par on this purchase, so I tucked it away for later. Meanwhile, I started checking the “failed” disks on my main system and found them healthy.
A little frustration always helps to make one more determined. So I went back to the SI3114 controller and started doing all kinds of things that made no sense until by luck I found a post that described where the drivers are downloaded from the Silicon Image website.
You see, the support page has a huge area devoted to different areas of interest and on the very bottom there is one little drop box to pick a product. I missed that, mea culpa.
With the drivers being so many I started checking online for other SI3114 users, most offering systems working with the non-raid driver. Got that, installed it and it worked… until the next reboot that is. System froze at a prompt that said Press CTRL + S or F4 to enter the RAID utility. More research online and I saw this was a common problem amongst users of this card. In fact, most people that recommended the use of the non raid drivers were also faced with this problem, however I had missed that this driver NEEDS the presence of a non raid bios.
So I ask, why is a little simple card trying to play in the RAID playpen while lacking the proper tools to do so? Software raid is so ineffective and such a resource hog, especially as we are moving in the area of parity RAID settings and multiple disks. It’s like a 10 year old driving a rig, sure it’s doable but only at very low speeds to keep it safe.
In any case, my card had a raid bios installed and that caused it to freeze the system. Why it froze is something I don’t know and seemingly no one else knows. On to flashing the bios with a non raid one. SI website has multiple bios,for the non raid one we need the IDE BIOS. Next we need the flashing utility, thankfully there is windows flash utility on the same page, first one. Downloaded that too, and run it. No joy. The command would run but it would return nothing as if it could not continue but with no troubleshooting message or error message or exit variable. SI suggested in a how to flash bios document that if one forces install of the non raid driver (link specifically for the WHS compatible driver list – I used the SiI3114 non-RAID 32-bit Windows Driver which by the way IS the correct driver and ended up using) and connects it to a drive, then in the properties of the controller device a tab would appear labelled Flash Bios that could do the work. Tried that too, about 6 times, uninstalling and hot swapping the drive and going back and forth between the raid and non raid driver. The result was disappointing as it would not allow the flashing of the bios without a restart and a restart would throw an error and the device would not load in the OS. Already getting tired…
More research, many people have this problem and again suggest to use the FreeDOS bootable CD-ROM which means downloading the .iso, opening it, appending the flash DOS utility and the new bios, remaking the .iso and burning it to a CD-ROM.
All of this to make a card work… also I don’t know how to edit .iso files and don’t care as there is also no CD-ROM drive in my WHS anymore (removed it after the initial install – cables in there are already tidied up and I don’t wanna…)
At least this motherboard is USB bootable, and I already have a stick that boots to DOS, put in it the DOS flashing util, the bios and take it to the WHS… which does not boot from it. Seems that my USB flash drive was recognized as a USB HDD and hence the boot order menu didn’t consider it a USB device but an HDD (confused yet?). So when I set up only USB boot devices (USB-Floppy, USB-Zip, USB-CDROM) it ignored the flash drive… Looking why and checking EVERY option in the BIOS as a good paranoid system troubleshooter does, found the Flash drive listed under the HDDs recognized in the boot HDD order. Popped it in first position and finally worked. DOS environment, flash worked bios updated WHS recognized the device and popped the right driver and the HDD was recognized and added to the pool.
That’s 6 hours of troubleshooting and frustration because the manufacturer wanted a RAID bios on a card that is ill-equipped to do proper raid. Congrats and thank you for this adventure.
May 21st, 2010
I recently bought a new flash drive and as I was researching for speed and price, I came across something rather odd.
At first I saw the Corsair Fast Voyager 8GB flash drive. Costs £17.23 and is rather fast at 32.7MB/s average read and 20.3MB average write according to this test.
Next I saw the Corsair Flash Voyager GT 128 128GB flash drive. It was more about curiosity to see this massive drive. The site also had a review on it. This drive costs £310.47. Quite a lot, but more surprisingly, not all that faster, with 31MB/s read and 23MB/s write.
So speed-wise, the drives are the same, so how about size-wise? For the 8GB drive you get 475.45MB per pound, while for the 128GB you get 422.17MB per pound. Not that big of a difference, but still more than 10% worse.
But here comes the real blow. In the review, the 128GB flash drive is pitted against the Corsair X128, a solid state drive with eSATA connection. Costs £321.97 and averages 94.2MB/s and 91.9MB/s for read and write respectively. Look at this page again and do the math.
Here is a table to digest these numbers.
Now tell my which is the most worthless buy…
November 29th, 2009
It has been noted that this router has a problem with the setup of the Remote Access feature of WHS. It plays nice with the UPnP protocol and the WHS reports as having setup the router successfully, but it turns out that there is a problem and the (name).homeserver.com is not accessible, pointing instead to your router admin page.
The reason for it is that the router will not forward the 443 port required and reserves it for its own use, hence when the https connection is established it just points to the router.
There are two ways to deal with it. One, you force the router to release port 443 and all is well, and two, translate any port you wish to 443 for the server. Solution one is described here but I dont like it. It means forcing your router to do something it doesnt want to which one never knows what it can cause, and the proccess itself is not so easy and requires a certain knowledge that not everyone has.
The second option, however is far simpler and easy. All one need to do is forward other ports and some have even suggested to point the one above it (i.e. instead of 443, forward 444). Now here are two points that need to be made.
1. This solution does work. As the router does not restrict other ports except 443, forwarding any port you want to the server with a trigger for 443 will work.
2. This can cause major problem if you are not a little careful. As I said, some suggested using port 444 to handle the server. Port 444, however, is quite common, used in pagers all over the world and could trouble you.
For this reason, I would suggest that you go here and find a port that is not showing. Then use this to call your server and have your router catch that port and forward it to the server with a 443 translation.
Here is how (in pictures). Enter your router and go to the port forwarding page. Put a name for the scheme and create a blank one.
Type in the ports and hit Add after each one. Make sure that the protocol is set to TCP, not any or UDP.
After you reach this point, click on Assign a game or application to a local network device.
This final image is what you should end up with.
The address I am using for my WHS is of my own choosing, simply because I have a certain addressing scheme in my head (router at the end of the subnet, then servers, with printers at the start and everything else starting from 64 onward – for a standard 255.255.255.0 subnet). You will of course replace that with the address of your own WHS.
Now all you have to do is let people know that the proper address for them to log in to your site is:
https://(name).homeserver.com:395/remote
and that is all.
November 28th, 2009
So I finally decided to do this thanks to, in no small part, the fact that you can download it straight from Microsoft and have 30 days of full use (or 120 if you do some other stuff mentioned there, which I intend to do shortly). But the old PC I was using as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) was a little too weak for this. However it is not too weak to become the new communications PC (running only Skype and Chrome). So begun the switch.
OLD SCHEME:
1. NAS: Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512MB ram, Intel D865 Perl M/B, Siluro FX5600 (AGP)
2. CommsPC: AMD64 3200+, 1GB ram, MSI K9N Neo2 M/B, Sapphire Radeon X1950Pro (AGP)
NEW SCHEME:
1. WHS: Old CommsPC with the GPU from NAS as the WHS doesn’t require anything really.
2. CommsPC: Old NAS with the X1950Pro (because you never know… and it did provide me with a benefit I did not foresee at the beginning, more about that later)
Stage 1: X1950 in the Pentium machine, all well, installed Skype and Chrome, sound check in Skype, done.
Stage 2: Siluro in AMD machine.
Problem 1: Machine will not start, not even bios. The MSI m/b would throw beeps, one long two short (code for error with VGA). So I removed the Siluro thinking it was toast and pulled into active service a retired Manli FX5200. Same problem. I was getting worried and upset. I knew Siluro worked, it was working in the NAS. Tried it again, still beeped. Changed the cards many times, for no good reason really, but as a trained PC user and builder my instincts were good and one time Siluro worked. Perhaps the AGP connector is getting peculiar in its old age…
Problem 2: WHS bootable DVD would not boot. Well, not exactly, the system would find the bootable disc and it would seem to try to do it, but every time it did so, the VGA signal was getting cut off and the monitor would go to sleep since it detected no signal. This was much harder to figure out. Tried removing power consuming devices one by one till I was left with only the VGA and a hard drive. Didn’t help. Tried another DVD drive I had around, a Plextor reader (instead of the normal Phillips writer), still nothing. Many, many crazy things later I decided to go irrational. Again, for no reason, I changed the connection between VGA and Monitor from a D-Sub to a DVI. All worked fine. There goes the D-Sub connection of the card (broken or temperamental stuff start piling up).
Stage 3: Installing the WHS.
Problem 3: This was just a matter of personal preference, but when I build a system I like partitioning it. And I don’t like logical partitions all that much. So WHS complained that I did not have 65GB of space in the primary disk drive. Of course not, it was a WD 36GB Raptor. Remove that, change it with a WD 500GB disk, installation commenced.
After very few input I had to give the installation starting working and never bothered me again. After about an hour I was confronted with a bare desktop and a warning to (paraphrasing) “please logoff and work from the Connection app from your other PCs as messing around locally can really screw up stuff, thank you”. Very well, but of course, I had to check it out first.
Problem 4: No network installed. No worries, I said naively, run the Network setup wizard. It would not of course, and after the second time that the wizard simply vanished after I started it, I went to the System module in Control Panel. Ethernet card detected but not installed. This was really surprising, especially considering it had detected and installed the Siluro FX5600 perfectly. Why would a server know more about VGA cards (which can easily be substituted with a generic VGA driver since they are only needed for the initial setup as they go head-less for the remainder of their service) than NICs is beyond me. I downloaded the driver pack for the motherboard from the MSI website and put it in my USB stick. WHS saw the stick and I did an update driver for the NIC (stands for Network Interface Card, if you were wondering). WHS said there is no driver for it in the stick. Trying to calm down, I run the setup program from the stick, which specifically said that it would install the Ethernet driver. Finished fine, rebooting the system, still the driver was missing. I then thought to go to the source; searched for Realtek Gigabit drivers, found a driver pack, and that did the job. At long last.
Everything from then on was (and still is great). Pointed my PC to \\server\Software and found the installation for the WHS Connect app that allows management of the server. Too tired to do anything more, disconnected the server and put it back where the NAS was (hidden away with just power and net cable connected). Put the new Comms PC behind my TFTs and was suddenly overcome with a desire to use the ViewSonic’s vertical orientation feature. This will give me better view of documents and browsing which is now its sole purpose. The Sapphire helped immensely by using the CCC (Catalyst Control Center) to rotate the resolution and everything worked perfectly.
November 27th, 2009
My RAID5 setup broke again. The controller told me that one of the hard disks had failed. OK, no biggy, that’s what RAID5 is there, all the data are safe. Sure, but Murphy’s Law states that when something can break at the most inconvenient time, it will. So did another PC and the bug is so weird that to this day I still have found no way to fix it (short of a format). Amidst my frustration, I left it alone to go fix my RAID.
Big mistake. Never troubleshoot when frustrated or sleepy or whatever impairs your judgment. The following is given in historical order, but keep in mind that I’m messing with the wrong disk, just so you can laugh at me.
I removed the disk that failed (which now I know was a healthy one). Went back in to check on my data and I found them inaccessible. Befuddled, I tried to see if it was just a glitch so I took the failed disk to my main PC, run a chkdsk and it did not find any errors. Plug it back in the RAID and try a rebuild. Nope… no luck. OK then, maybe if I format it and check it. Back to the main PC for a low level format, which went on very well (yes, I formatted a healthy disk…). Back to the RAID and rebuild, nothing!
All the while, the RAID controller shows me info that should have woken me up, but I was just too involved in my process of reviving the “failed” disk to figure out.
OK, back to the main PC and format it again, make a system volume and test copy files and run chkdsk. All works perfectly! Now I’m really starting to lose it. Back in the RAID and rebuild… nothing (of course…). At this time I give up and task my laptop to temporary storage, thinking that the disks is indeed lost and planning to send it back to WD for a replacement.
Thankfully, I did not send it, but rather, in a moment of clarity, decide to troubleshoot each disks separately. It is during this process that I finally posses enough clarity to call myself a true idiot and do what I should have done.
Lessons to be learned:
• Know the logical number of your controller’s ports, i.e. which port is port0, which is port1 etc.
• Test drives independently and LISTEN to your controller’s console.
• Never troubleshoot when not 100% concentrated
• When one drive fails in a RAID5 array and you cannot access your data, you have removed the WRONG disk. Slap yourself awake and prey you caught it on time.
May 16th, 2009
My NAS finally filled up with all those things I collect and all the CD-DVD I burned over the years and have now transfered to my NAS. 500GB seemed like a good idea at the time of designing it, but evidently it just wasn’t up to the task. So I upgraded it to a 1TB of storage space. Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB times three on a Raid5 setup is just what the doctor ordered.
However there was the issue of what to do with the other disks. This was the beginning of a two day proccess. To start with, here is what my old setup was like in both my main and NAS systems:
So this is what I decided to do: The old SpinPoints will go to a RAID0 in my main system (drives F and G), the Raptors will take up the job of C, D and E drives and the 120GB Western Digital will go to an IceBox external enclosure. Talk about a difficult move.
First of all I had to do some research to make sure that one could move a RAID array. After many hours I found a few articles that basically said “[...] if every hardware component of your array (controller, bios, disks, connections etc.) are moved, then there is a good chance that the array will survive – still take some backups [...]“. That was not very reassuring though. So even though I had everything burned to DVDs there was still the element of fear; who wants to copy 500GB from DVDs and CDs anew?
So I unscrewed the hard drives and did not disconnect them from the XFX Revo controller and I installed te controller to the main system. Luckily enough the main system has loads of juice to run the disks so it didn’t even blink when it was asked to run 6 disks at once.
A few hiccups later, the array was working perfectly. That was all the risky work done and I thought the rest of it was going to be a breeze. Only one hour had passed and I was certain that the whole upgrade would be over in a few more.
Final hardware steps; install the newly purchased XFX Revo to the NAS with the new T166′s. Again, flawless installation and array creation. This is one of the best hardware pieces I have ever had the pleasure of working with. All that was left was to copy 500GB from the main system to the 1TB array in the NAS. I thought it was going to be quick, after all I had a Gigabit ethernet installed and the copying was happening from one raid to another (RAID5 is basically a RAID0 with a safety feature, which means the speed of reading/writing is vastly improved over that of any one disk). However it would stubbornly insist on only transferring 20MB per second. I still do not know what happened, but after a few tweaks in the network setup of both computers I managed to increase it to 40MB/sec (CISCO academy education put to good use…) but it was still low considering that in the past I have been able to copy from the NAS at the speed of 70MB/sec. Needless to say, it took some time…
When that was done (thank you Babylon 5 DVD sets for providing some entertainment during the wait) the NAS was ready. One part complete. Now to fix up the main system.
Moving the partitions around was going to be tricky – and dangerous – but I could not be bothered to build the system from scratch and so that was the only other way. After a lot of research – one phone call – and careful consideration – about 5 seconds – I bought this amazing piece of software: Acronis Disk Director Suite. It allowed me to resize the partitions to fit in the Raptors (C and D drives were 56GB and had to fit in a 35GB disk, and E drive was 60GB also to fit in a 35GB disk). Game partitions were no biggie as they easilly fit in two logical partitions in the 500GB array.
The resizing was amazingly easy and quick and safe. I could not be happier. Now all I needed was to transfer the partitions to their new home. Enter Norton Ghost which had served me well in other likewise situations (transfering of the system partition to a new disk). Only this time it did not want to cooperate. I copied the partition and tried to boot from the Raptor, but the bios would not seem to want to! It kept going at the very end of the boot disk sequence and would still boot from the original system disk. Just in case, I removed the old system disk and the system just said “No System Disk found” and stood there.
I was beginning to worry. I knew that it was not a hardware failure, since I had taken steps with Acronis to make the Raptor’s partition Active (translation: your boot disk carries a marker that tells your system that this is a disk you can boot from) so the only conclusion was that Ghost messed up!
In all frustration I plugged back the old system disk and the system booted once more. At least there was that… I tried to look around in Ghost, help files, system options, anything, for a clue as to why it was not able to do what it previously did so well, but it was not looking good.
I don’t know what made me go back to Acronis, it must have been a desperate hope of maybe finding something there that would explain the problem. Instead I found the solution. Acronis had a feature to COPY partitions but I thought that this would mean to copy the partition information, not the data in the partition, due to the Ghost’s copy option that does just that. However, it was not the same.
Acronis’s copy partition was just what I needed. The Raptors were now booting up the system and everything was perfect. A few resizes later (because I had intentionally made the old partitions 30GB to ensure they would fit) and the new system was ready too.
Final Thoughts: did all that save me time? Probably not, a fresh install would be faster, but I have a system that is full of little utils and apps that are just too many to know what data to backup before a fresh install. I know it is good for a PC to be formated every now and then, especially one that is running like mine with so many apps and uninstalls and demos and shareware try-outs, but every time I format I loose something. This is why I’m glad I will be going to the army in a few months. It forces me to not upgrade CPU-M/B now and so when I’m done with the army it will be Aug 08 and Vista will be better and new hardware will be available and I will be able to put this machine together from scratch while my current PC will take on an other role. It will be modified to not run all those thing it is now running, but nothing will be removed from it. All files and utils (especially those that do not require an install to work so people place them in all the weird places then can think of or have space for) will remain in the system and I will be able to retrieve them. Yes I’m paranoid, but I don’t care 
What will most likely happen is this:
New Computer = main system
Current main system = NAS
Current NAS = media center
P.S. also, by the time I’m back from the army I’m hopeful that Wireless N devices will be part of an IEEE protocol and work better for streaming media than all the other wireless junk out there right now. That will make a wireless media center worth while…
May 27th, 2007
My internet is back! Tuesday noon I got a phone call to my cell confirming that the line was fixed (although I saw that it was fixed when I woke up, but it was nice of them to call me). However I did not understand what the problem was, something about static packets on my line that were cleared!
I’m having a hard time believing that as it was explained. From what I know there can be no stuck packets on a line. So I’m guessing that they cannot explain it to me as clearly, even though I asked.
I finally thought that I was going to have a nice day when I got home, but at 2130 the Power Supply Unit gave out! It was so sudden that I didn’t know if it was the PSU that had died or it was a forced shutdown to prevent some damage to another part of the system. For the next 3 hours I tried to power up the PC but to no avail, so it was most probable that the PSU had been fried! Talk about bad luck…
So today, bright and early I walked in my local PCWorld branch (no laughing, I was desperate and there is no other PC vendor within walking distance) and got myself a Jeantech Storm 700W PSU. There was some debate with the technicians there whether it would support my two-molex X1950Pro AGP card which needed 20A on the 12V rail since only one of its rails gives adequate amperage (12V2 gives 25A while the other two give 16A and 17A). I was assured though that if I plugged it in and it didn’t work I could bring it back within 7 days.
When I got home I was a little baffled over which modular cable was being assigned to the 12V2 rail, the manual said nothing, so I just plugged it on the middle of the three available. Thankfully it worked and my VGA works great. Weird note: Jeantech’s description of the PSU on their site gives different amperages for the 12V rails and only shows two of them… I’m going to trust the box which shows all three rails.
Finally, it is always cool to be able to see just how many Watts your PC is eating, right now it is munching on 104W 
March 14th, 2007
At least one PC is done…
To my surprise, the GeForce 5600 card was problematic. I say to my surprise because it actually works, only for a very short time. Back a few months, my sister returned here and she booted her PC. After a few minutes the PC hanged and she called me to ask what was wrong.
At first, she blamed the hang on the programs I had installed on her PC while she was gone (for the better part of six months), which is typical of people to think others are to blame because they “touched” it and now it’s broke!
Of course the issue was completely different, having to do with the VGA cooling fan being stuck and not working, which led to high temperatures in the VGA core and thus the hang. It was a mess, once I pulled it out and tried to apply lubricant to it’s ball bearing, the whole thing fell apart and some kind of rusty substance was apparent on everything inside.
I thought that with one hang the card would be fine (probably correlating with a main CPU but now I know I shouldn’t have) so I saved it and got a new fan. The new fan works great, but the card does not…
It will show its BIOS information upon boot, but then the whole system hangs at the main POST and doesn’t even produce beep codes… I do not have the technical knowledge to explain this, so I guestimate that the card is so messed up that even the slightest temperature differential from idle is enough to hang it.
At least, the old card is working great and the system is running smoothly and much faster than it used to. I also thing that the new onboard sound card is better than the last one, I played a short video to test both DirectDraw and DirectSound and I could swear that I could hear it clearer…
Anyway, tomorrow I will go and try to find the cheapest VGA available (probably from a second hand store) to install in the NAS system… Can’t do anything else till I’m able to see a screen output. The system is pretty much build, all it misses is a VGA.
December 20th, 2006
Being superstitious is no stranger to computer guys! I know one guy that will not power up a newly built PC before checking that all screws are present and tight. This might seem strange to you, but consider the fact that he once spent a day troubleshooting an error in his PC only to find out that his VGA would not work unless screwed on the case!
I have many such examples and now I have one of my own!
I finally finished building my sister’s upgrade and was happy with myself for doing it rather quickly. So I plugged everything in and hit the on/off switch on the PSU (that is the thing in your PC that provides the electrical power, the one you plug with the power mains cord). To my surprise the system starts booting!
First alarm; PCs shouldn’t power up when you turn the PSU on, they should wait for the power switch to be pressed…
Second alarm; the monitor is still in standby mode (power light is still orange, instead of green) so it doesn’t receive any signal…
Third alarm; there are no POST beeps (if something is wrong, the computer will let you know by emitting a series of beeps in a special way that is specific for every possible problem it can find, i.e. one long and two short beeps mean there is something wrong with the motherboard). That was what really got me worried.
Final kill point; power button does not work!
At this time I’m sweating (figuratively speaking)! Quickly unplug everything and run the basic hardware troubleshoot everyone who is a computer geek knows how to do; remove everything but the CPU and memory, unplug everything except the power cord and hope for the best. Unfortunately, the end result was the same, the PC would power up but still no beeps and the power switch would still not work!
It was time to check the case connectors, those little cables that connect the power switch, reset switch, power light and HDD activity light to the motherboard. They have the tendency to NOT be clear which way they should go and that surprises me still. Every other plug on the motherboard has a physical shape that allows only one way for a cable to connect. Imagine a whole that is in the shape of a square, but one side of it is curved. Now there is only one way for a cable that has this shape to fit in this hole (and indeed the main power cables to the motherboard bear this very shape I just mentioned). Why is it that the case cables still don’t have this? …
In any case, after trying many many variations on those cable orientations, I head to the Internet. Using again a variety of keywords and boolean expressions involving power switch not working and power being available to the machine, I could only find the worst case scenario (and about 80% of those cases involving MACs that are known to suffer such a problem), mainly that either the PSU was insufficient or that the m/b was fried.
Combined with the previous strain I put my m/b under while installing the CPU fan, I was almost in tears in fear that I had somehow broken the m/b.
So I tried one solution I could think of, switching PSUs. I had the new case I bought for the NAS system and it was larger in wattage since it would host plenty of HDDs. But it was also newer and I thought (without reason) that it might be better.
Of course it was not… and by that time I was ready to give up. At that time, the geek in me rose up and refused to admit defeat just yet! There was one thing I could still do. Remove everything and build the system out of all the new parts!
Confused? Let me clear it up a bit; the first system I build had these things from the old system: case, PSU, HDD, DVD-ROM. The new parts were the m/b, the CPU and the memory. Eventually the HDD and the DVD-ROM were also removed, but it would still not run, and I even used the new PSU and it would still not run, so all that was left was the case!
‘So change that too!’, the geek in me said, and he was RIGHT!
Upon building the system in the new case the system worked PERFECTLY!
EXPLAIN THAT!
December 19th, 2006
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