Cooling Fans and their controller finally arriving

So many months have gone by since I had ordered my additional fans and the a controller to control them along with some other accessories. Finally it seems that I may get them. My good friend Arun Bhakthavalasalam had very helpfully held on to them in US so that he could bring them when he come to India, but fate had other plans. His stay in US has been extended and that would mean further delay of the consignment. To avoid more delay in the items I had them got couriered to my place.

It was sent using USPS service. The tracking of consignment stopped after it reached India. My parcel got stuck in Customs.

I received a notice from the customs department about the parcel and they wanted a host of documents about the items. The documents were permission from RBI and so many other permits from other ministries. The rule is something like that we are not allowed to import stuff exceeding in value of Rs 2000. This amount includes the shipping changes also. Even if I ship something of zero value the shipping itself would go above the princely limit allowed to us. Ridiculous...

I went to the customs department to explain my shipment and to get it released. At first the superintendent was very angry and gave me nice dressing down about it. He wanted me go give a technical write-up about the items in parcel and why I needed them. I asked me about why I needed 4 fans for a single computer when the computer can run for 24*7 with the normal CPU fan. I had to explain things about the over clocking the processor and how cooling is important to do it.

The second time around he was receptive to what I was saying. It seems that before me, two people had tried to fool him and had signed in place of other people to clear their consignment.

Finally he cleared my parcel...

It should be arriving this week by Indian post at home and after paying custom duty of about 1k or so I should be able to finally see the stuff I paid for so many months back.

Thanks to my friend Arun Bhakthavalasalam for holding on to it and then taking the trouble to get it shipped to me. Taking time out of his busy schedule must have been difficult.

Awaiting the shipment anxiously ...

Brought a Hard Disk finally!!!

A simple activity like buying a hard disk also bring around complexity in my life. The story goes something like this.

After waiting since long I have brought a hard disk for my system. It is a 500GB model of Seagate ST3500320AS with 32 MB cache.

I had got the hard disk one week earlier itself but unfortunately it was a ST3500820AS model which is the 8 mb model. but the thing is the Seagate does not make 8 MB model of 500 GB model. I find out that it is the result of a wrong firmware from Seagate. They loaded a 8 Mb model firmware on the 32 MB model resulting in the drive only using 8 MB of the available cache and wasting the rest.

I called up the shop for a replacement and they said i will get it when ever i take the hard disk to their shop.

I thought lets upgrade the firmware and I wont need to to got to the shop. I downloaded the latest firmware which was supposed to solve the issue AD14. Spent a day searching for any floppy disk lying around. I finally had to burn a cd for the firmware. It was gonna be dangerous since my CD drive is a SATA and the hard disk upgrade might be disturbed by it.

The upgrade failed and I had a SATA brick with me remaining as a trophy for my upgrade efforts.

I went and got it replaced this week and now have it running.

Next step is another one of this HDD and RAID 0.
The performance score for my Hard disk is as follows:
The Vista experience score for hard disk is now 5.9. Now working on processor to get it to 5.9.
(5.6 score is for AMD 6000+ overclocked to 3300 Mhz from BIOS)

Got a wi-fi Adapter G-122 Dlink

So many days since i have written anything. My net was down as the LAN cable connecting my computer to the router got badly cut. It was connected through the window and it got cut due to ht eopening and closing of the window pane.

My mistake entirely, I should have cut a groove or something so that the cable does not come in contact with the window. Anyways, the cabling was going around the entire place very badly and was messin up the place so i decided to go wireless.

The router was already an acess point D-link dI 524 so not expense on that side. There were two options here, one was to get an internal PCI card D-510 or to get an USB variant of called the USB adapter GWL G-122 . The GWL G132 which is an 108 Mb wi-fi seemed a more future proof solution but it was not available here and it would have taken some time for it to arrive.

SO finnaly I have got the wirless thing working and finaly the net is working after a month or so. The product driver and the net monitor software provided in the package seem not to support Vista. The drivers work and the connection i available but the Vista security had messed up the net monitor software and does not work.

I searched around and found some driver/software for Vista but in all the cases the software did not work. The drivers worked though.

It would have been nice to be able to monitor the wireless connection though...

Top fan hole finally done

The top fan hole is done and finished on the cabinet. Now my cabinet has an 120 mm exhaust fan blowing hot air from the top of the cabinet, The perfect place for the exhaust fan to be placed. [image]The fan I have fitted there is the scythe 120 mm I had purchased long time back along with the computer parts from ABGB mumbai.

I had a tough time finding someone selling this stuff in India then but now ABGB have a website where you can buy stuff like scythe fan and thermalright heatsinks etc. Rest is the normal stuff.
Also two side holes for the intake fans are done and awaiting the fans for them. My choice is the Scythe ultra kaze range of fans the fastest of the range 3000 rpm pushing 133 CFM at 45 dba. Another fan I am interested is a very fast delta fan 127mm x 38mm Delta EFB1312VHE Case Fan (185 CFM, 55.5 dBA)

Controlling these fans would be the "KAZE MASTER" 5.25" Bay Fan Controller and temperature monitor, which is a cool fan controller with LCD display showing the temperatures of the system. It won't support the Delta fan as the fan demands lot of power but the scythe can be handled by it.

These things can be checked out at the http://www.petrastechshop.com/ which is a great online store and the people will respond to your mails. They do hide behind the nameless help mail ids and send system generated mails to you. I asked some queries and they were very helpful about it. They also ship to India but the shipping from US to India is anyway very expensive.

All the above product are not available in India and will need to bought in US and a friend of mine will be bringing it to my place. Don't think these will be ever be available in India since no one out here cares about the details.

Drill has arrived

In my last post I had mentioned something about improving the airflow in my computer cabinet and that i was gonna cut/drill some holes to fit some fans on the side panel.

Now in continuation of that story.

I had enquired about the drilling process with some engineering shops nearby. They said something like 2 Rs for every hole to be drill. I needed space for three fans and provision of all three sizes of fans 80mm, 92mm and 120mm on those. These itseld made up 48 holes. And we have not even started on the holes for the air to go in /out. That would asily be some 2-3 hundred holes. At that cost I could buy a drill set for myself.

And thats what i have done. I searched around the net for a home delivery type of drill set. Between indiatimes and rediff this drill from the same vendor was costing different. Maybe the typist or policies are different for the two sites.

OK so after a wait of about 10 days my drill set has arrived. Surprishingly lightweight package. One drill , pliers, wrench, screwdriver set, tape measure, drill bits 5 of each type(wood metal and something else). Nice package. Everyone should have one. Everything stays at one place and is easily accessible. No searching around.

So this week end i will be destroying the side panel of the cabinet by trial and error to do y personal cabinet modification. I also need to order some scythe fans from ABGB. Rally nice fans . No noise at all.

My fish tank filter/ Air pump make more noise that my CPU :)

Upgrading BIOS of CROSSHAIR motherboard

Today I finally updated the BIOS. I wanted to to do this since I got the computer but the ASUS site was not opening up the downloads page for CROSSHAIR.

• You may find info about CROSSHAIR ASUS site official
• Another very good site with useful info was pcstat review of CROSSHAIR.

Now after so many day of waiting I have finally got the new BIOS. The idea being that any product or software ships with bugs and they are sorted out as time progresses. I am a software engineer and I know how software's are made. Basically, the makers/manufacturers decide based on the severity of the bugs remaining and the degree of testing done whether to release the software or not. Rest are handled as updates. Also manufacturers cant simulate every possible scenario in which the product will be used.

The latest version of BIOS as of today was 904. 905 was also there as a BETA but I am using the release version. Next I downloaded the ASUS update utility from Asus site to update the bios.

Asus download site for CROSSHAIR

I tried using the EzFlash option from he BIOS itself but the thing wasn't showing my file correctly and was displaying garbage characters. Not to take that risk, I tried it with ASUS update utility. Even after downloading the latest one from the site , the little bugger found even more latest version of itself on asus site and spent a lot of time comfortably downloading it. The latest version now being 7.13.04.

Even though this version of ASUS update does not say its compatibility with Vista. I decided to use it anyway with the reason explained above.

The upgrade progressed nicely without much trouble. I had closed all other programs before I went into this.

It asked for the machine to be restarted. It restarted. I checked the setup to see any visible changes but couldn't find any.

So after the BIOS update, next few things to do for me would be:

• Find the maximum overclocking limit of my machine. 6000+ @ 3Mhz now
• Drill fan holes in the side panel door to fit three big fans. for cooling the motherboard-CPU.

Right now the air gets trapped inside when the door is closed and temperature crosses 60C. Though not very high, I would like to reduce it. The fans I am gonna fit is 120mm Scythe S-Flex 63 CFM. I already have two and I am gonna get some more. Super silent and mighty efficient.

My ThermalRight 120 extreme is helping a lot bit in moving heat away from the processor but it need to go out of cabinet also. Power supply doesn't feel things to be hot enough to speed up its fan. Those Corsair guys put some hot material in 620HX.

Vista not booting "bootmgr compressed" I can compress it but cant read it later

Superb thing happened to me the other day

I have installed Vista on my system drive which was only 10 GB in size, So i am always short on space since beginning. After moving all the optional things like pagefile and index location i am able to fit vista in there.

So for freeing up some space i compressed my system drive . It gave some warning regarding this but i ignored them. Very stupid thing as it turned out.

So after the days work(??) i switched off the computer and went to sleep.

Next the comp refused to boot stating that the bootmgr(a file it uses to boot) is compressed and it does not like the boot files to be touched and advised me to press ALT+CTRL+DEL to restart the comp.

Now everybody and their kids know the ALT+CTRL+DEL restarts the comp, and how is this thing gonna improve the situation is not stated. Carrying out the order takes us back to the same message. Some helpful(recursive) message this.

Now some net searching about this revealed it to be a very generic and unsolved problem. It plagues both XP and Vista it seems. They ask permission for useful things like defrag an scandisk but allow such a destructive operation to be carried out by anyone.

The solution to this as i found out here

http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-bootmgr-missing.html

was :

compact /u c:\bootmgr

compact /u c:\ntldr

from the command prompt thru XP or Vista recovery console by booting from the XP ot vista install disk.

I got to the point of entering the password for windows but failed there since i dont use password for my login and dont remember any password i might have entered while installing.

Then i tried to change the compressed drive parameter from Ubuntu but it does not seem to have any option for that.

How do you undo an operation

Best way to undo any operation is to reverse the steps done. Right.

So i took my hard disk to friends place, Attached it there, ran the above commands for my drive and also by the GUI to be sure about it.

Came back . Started comp and it STARTED.

So much excitement for a very silly thing to do . I mean when you are so short of space that you have to compress entire drive, its best to get a new hard disk.

I really need to get two HDD and get them working in RAID 0 very soon now.