matthearn.com

It’s been some time, so we’re gonna break it down West Virginia-style. Show me what you got!

• I may or may not have mentioned, I got a new job! Actually, I know I didn’t mention it, because nothing was finalized until just a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to jynx anything, and then things were insanely busy for the last few weeks at CSC and then of course the first week at AIG.

  I’m not gonna say anything rude about CSC, since that seems tacky and possibly actionable at law, but I will say this: wow, what a difference. AIG is just a completely different environment. In some ways that’s great, and in some ways it’s not so great, but the aggregate result is general awesomeness.

• I’m finally going over to the dark side. Or was I already on the dark side, and now I’m going over to the light side? Hard to say, but it is certainly the whitest piece of electronic equipment I’ve ever owned. I, of course, ordered it on a Friday afternoon before a holiday, so I’ll be lucky if I have it by mid-June.
• Speaking of computational power, I got permission to buy MYSELF a new lappy by fixing my wife’s, a 2-year-old Dell Inspiron B130 that had developed the following inexplicable behaviors:
  1. Getting hotter than a melon picker’s taint in August. Seriously, if you turned it on and sat it on your bare legs, after a while you’d start to smell singed hair and be like, the hell? OW!
  2. Ridiculous slowdowns at completely random times. Work in Photoshop for 45 minutes? No problem! Attempt to open up Wordpad? Oh, that’s gonna take me a few minutes. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
  3. Heat-related shutoffs. Basically the box would just turn itself off, and then turned it on after it cooled, you’d get this nice message saying “I turned myself off ’cause it was too hot out!” Really great.

  I did a little googlin’ and found two possible solutions to the problem:

  • Take the lappy apart and blow the dust out of it. I took it apart as far as I dared (didn’t wanna break anything) and didn’t see much in the way of dust, but I sprayed it with a can of air anyway. No effect.
  • Undervolt the CPU so that it absorbs less electricity, and thusly, less heat. Turns out this model CAN’T undervolted. Yay!

  So I was getting pretty pissed, and finally went to the Dell website to see if I could find instructions on complete disassembly of the system, and found a thing saying “if your B130 is overheating, here is how to take out the heat sink and clean the dust out of it.” What? Why didn’t Google turn this up? Google, you have led me astray!

  So I took the heat sink out, and sure enough, there was a clump of cat hair in there big enough to roll into felt and make a hat from. I got that out, blew some can o’ air in there, and put everything back together. Now there’s no heat problems at all. I’ve had this sitting on my junk for the time it’s taken me to type this out (maybe 20 minutes) and nothing’s afire! Woo!

  As an added bonus, the CPU processing power has gone from about 1GHz to 1.4GHz. I guess processors have ways of detecting when things are too hot and just slowing everything down. Ain’t a problem no more, this puppy’s whirling like a dervish.

  So in short, if your compy is too hot and it’s burning your groin, pop the heat sink out and clean it.

The end.