With the cooling issue all taken care of (almost), I had one other computer issue to deal with with Himawari. When reading Facebook, I have a tendency to control-click lots of notifications to open them all in new tabs. But frequently that would lead to a random blue screen of death. Now, I had found a nifty utility that would comb through the mini-dumps and tell you want they were (BlueScreenView), but they were all over the place. The fact that they always occurred during heavy Facebook use, and it happened across two different browsers was confusing. Plus it didn't happen when I was using Etna. So it dawned on me that there might be something off with my hardware, not my software.

Enter Memtest.org. I ran MemTest86 overnight, and I got errors. So I ran them another night with just one DIMM in, and got errors. The next day while I was at work, I tested the other one. That one was clean. Running with just the one DIMM was okay, but a bit cramped. So this weekend's shopping included a run down to Fry's to get another 8 Gig stick. It was only $32.

While I was there I also grabbed a Silenx 120 mm fan. With all of the cooling moved outside the case, there wasn't anything but the very slow oversized fan that gently wafts over the drive bay moving any air inside the case. I had left the case open for a long time so I could watch the LED on the old Antec cooler, but that wasn't necessary any more. So when I buttoned up the case again, the video card started getting warm. (59 degrees C vs. 50 when open). I got this data from a monitoring program for my Corsair power supply I was finally able to run now that the internal USB header the Antec cooler hogged up was free for the usb cable that came with the power supply. (Those headers are two ports. I was going to make a splitter cable at some point, but that's no longer needed.) So while I was at Fry's, I grabbed the fan. It was hard to find something that didn't have multicolor LEDs in it for the casemod crowd. This one did have a little thermocouple hanging off of it to further moderate its speed and make it run even quieter. The fan definitely lives up to its name. It says it's <15 db, and I believe it. If they made a 4-pin model I'd consider changing out the fans on the radiator. And now, with the case closed up, the video card is running down at 48 Celsius.

I also grabbed another cheap 32 gig USB thumb drive. A long time ago I was able to get a USB card for my old Mac. It seemed like it would be a cheap way to back up the drive I've got left. Kind of a closing the barn after the horses burn it down.... It's been a bit trying since the thumb drive is DOS formatted, but the Mac has a way of putting its dual fork files on it that seems to be working. Biggest problem so far is file names with /'s in them, since they're legal on the Mac and not on DOS. Transfers are slow as heck, and figuring out where the occasional mismatches are coming from is not fun. But if I can get that squared away, and the freezer trick works on the dead drive, maybe I can save things.

Now I'm just struggling with Macrium to make a clone of my boot drive that is actually bootable. That backup is long ovedue. I had a malware scare with a fan control program I downloaded, which fortunately amounted to nothing, but then again, if the system is going to be stable again with the new ram, maybe manually setting the fan config after a boot won't be that big of a deal. I wanted to have a bootable scratch drive to test the fan program with. But an updated backup would be nice to have.

Oh, as for the title. Fry's itself, once a pinnacle of Electronics and Computer stores, had just been getting more and more depressing every time I visit, with more empty shelves and less selection than ever. And the things they do have in stock are just... odd.... Lots of things you never knew you never needed. And all the cute Asian girls are long gone. Even the surly Indian women are gone. The remaining staff, well, at least they seemed knowledgeable, but they were the final Rejects of Retailing - from "Middle-aged bodymod girl", to Mr. "We carry them but we don't have any", to "Guess my pronouns." The whole experience felt like they've been holding out on having their going out of business sale because the rest of the economy is so good, but they haven't been getting a piece of it.

Posted by: J Greely at July 30, 2019 09:33 PM (ZlYZd)

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