How to tell if your graphic is overheating from a flu ridden geek.

My attempt to explain how to tell if your graphic card is overheating with a few tests and observations.

Modding a crappy USD7 Logitech mouse for a little better performance.

So I had a budget for a mouse for general usage: RM30. So I bought this Logitech Mouse for RM25 or USD7.3 approx. The damn thing terrible. I broke my rule of test first before I buy when concerning mice and keyboards.

The Logitech's feet scrapped my Razer mouse pad and the scroll wheel had a soft scroll and a loud clack when it complete a spin-click. Which means the wheel floats a bit before next next notch.

So what do I do? Cry about it? Blow another RM40 for a new mouse? F**k no! I buy some mouse feet/skates and fix the suckers on! Increased the spring tension on the wheel and of course greased the wheel with some Vaseline so that the spring did not get stuck on the notches. Not to mention it no longer makes a cluck sound when it is spun.

Fixing my Mom's friend Laptop.

Most of the people who I had to repair stuff for usually bring me their gear when it's about to die.In this case my mom's friend Lisa brought to me again her Dell Inspiration 500M laptop.
This problem with the sucker is that the keyboard is screwed. Now that wouldn't be a problem you say as we can just stick in a keyboard into the USB port. Well her brother, who was the previous owner, mangled both ports to the point that both are missing the plastic piece that the USB connectors sit on. And one port is missing a pin all together!

Naturally, she was using an USB PCMCIA card for the keyboard but on boot you can't use the keyboard until windows loaded. Which was the problem. Her XP bit it too. So I thought I just desolder those dead USB ports and solder in some used ones from my spare motherboards. After 20 screws later I decided I didn't want to strip the Dell Laptop just to solder in the USB ports since I most likely will spend another 2 hours more trying to screw the 60 screws back (well I don't know how many but it's a hell lot).
So I thought, "Why not just solder a USB cable to the pins?" So I bought a cable, stripped. Double checked pinoutsand soldered the wires to the pins. After a quick test and some insulation I hot glued the port for protection and strength. Here is the finished work.

X-Mini 2 and X-Mini Max 2 Video Review.

My review of the X-Mini 2 and my impressions of the Max 2.

Naturally, YouTube doesn't like 20 min videos so I had to cut it up. Yeah, annoying.

All you ever want to know about PCs: CPUs

CPUs

Well let’s start with the basics, CPU are the brains of the PC while the Motherboard is the skeleton and nervous system. The make things fun desktop CPUs are either with pins or none. Those that still come with pins are the current AMD ones while Intel have implemented a pin-less route using circular connectors on the bottom of the CPU while the socket it plugs into has the pins. These pins are bent to provide some spring tension.

Naturally, the AMD CPUs are prone to pin damage from bad handling or just bad luck. But not to fear unless the pins break completely off you can very gently bend them back using a credit card. Make sure to use the other pins alignment as a guide. Intel CPUs do not suffer this hazard but should you damage the pins in the socket expect a much harder time getting them back into working condition.

Thankfully installing CPUs are a pain free task. Just align the marked of the CPU with the marked edge of the socket and drop it in. If done correctly there will be no resistance to the CPU going into socket. If there is resistance check your alignments again and see if there is anything in between the CPU and the socket.

Other that bent pins CPUs are pretty tough compared to the earlier generations. This is thanks to the hard caps all CPUs wear lovingly known as a heat spreader. The heat spreader does not only help spread the thermal waste from the small silicon die but also help spreads the weight placed on the CPU by the heatsink.

Protection

All CPUs nowadays have thermal protection should things get too hot. Motherboards will take preventive measures when CPUs reaching danger temperatures either by completely shutting down the PC or by throttling the speed of CPU down until the temperatures reach safe levels.

Another method of killing of a CPU is throwing tons of electrical power into it in hopes that it can clock at a higher speed. This overvolting will cause fatigue (electromigration) to the CPUs circuits which eventually will give. The life expectancy of any CPU really depends on the said CPU like overclocking gems a few will stand the pressure and give you years of service. Others will sometimes croak in less than a year. This also depends on how much you can cool it. The hotter the CPU is the more electromigration you incur.

Hyperthreading

Before we talk multi-core CPUs let quickly talk about Hyperthreading. Hyperthreading does not mean you have a free CPU core for each CPU core you bought. What Hyperthreading is, is that with the right OS your Intel CPU can use the unused instructions and idle clock cycles of your CPU core ran another set of calculations and instructions. This is done only if you have the free CPU resource for it. If a program is already occupying 80% of your CPU resource most likely the OS will not run any other instructions in parallel. AMD does not have Hyperthreading in their CPUs because they have designed their CPUs to run single operations more quickly compared to Intel’s CPUs. This has been the reason why Hyperthreading had disappeared from the Core Duo CPUs onwards. Hyperthreading was not as efficient as just having the CPU run one operation quickly since two operations on one CPU core sometimes trashed the Cache on it. Intel has now brought back Hyperthreading with their Core i7 lines and some of the CPUs in their Core i5 and Atom lines.

Multi-Cores

Last time when someone mentions ‘your CPU’ they meant the processor core on your silicon die. Nowadays, it is the other way round; the CPU now refers to the silicon die which can house anywhere from one core to six cores. These cores are the brains of the CPU where as the silicon die is the head. You may come across some CPU packages where there are two dies each with a single core on them that are connected to each other sharing the Cache such as the Pentium D.

Unfortunately, like Hyperthreading having multiple cores does not make your OS and the programs on it run twice as fast. All consumer grade OSes excluding Linux take very little advantage of a multi-core CPU. This has left programmers no choice but to optimise their own programs to take advantage of more than one core. Hence, you will notice not all programs will run four times faster just because you have a quad core CPU. A good example of this is games; only a few games currently take advantage of a multi-core CPU. One of them is Supreme Commander while the others will only benefit if you spend your money on a better graphic card, more RAM and RAID 0 your hard drives.