Overheating

summary of problem posted in Tom's hardware

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/319174-13-diagnosing-overheating-problem

some info I've read today

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=86817
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=878718
http://www.silentpcreview.com/Recommended_Heatsinks
http://www.intel.com/design/core2quad/components/index.htm
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/278950-10-ntel-core-quad-q6600-40ghz
http://www.overclock.net/intel-cpus/542722-current-processor-intel-r-core-tm.html
http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=IP35+Pro&fMTYPE=LGA775
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article818-page1.html

Looking good

Working with ordinary XP Home on Swish has been a real relief. I know how to fix things that go wrong in an instant, it's just... easy. It's still time consuming though, all the updates, the programs to install. I'm looking forward to just being able to sit down and use it.

One of the best things was buying Acronis TrueImage because I keep making backups to revert to and that was what made it particularly easy to sort out the Iiyama driver issue I ran into early on. I want to try and make a backup plan that will work, and to keep the computer really tidy and clean.

Home again, home again

Swish lay dormant for week after week which is such a shame for a computer with such potential. Eventually it clicked that the instability of XP Pro 64 bit was the problem. Every time I installed even the basics it would go into some kind of system failure and have to recover itself blah blah. I couldn't even tell if it was the hardware setup causing the problem.

It just made sense, with prices of OS's dropping to move to something else and after briefly considering Vista and reading up that it's actually slower and less stable than XP Home SP3 I just bought another XP Home. I know I know, it's going to be a total waste of the fancy processor but not using it at all is a waste of everything.

So I've installed Home yesterday and am putting on drivers and utilities at the moment and there's not a whiff of instability. It must all have been caused by the OS.

My aim is very much for a tidy and economically running machine, not to have bits and pieces of software installed and untidily uninstalled everywhere. So I'm trying to give thought to what I do and what I put on. At least I have this one as a living template for what I use and need.

All's feeling good in the computing world again now. Who knows, maybe I'll even get to create a bit of art again.

64 bit OS

I'm running into troubles from my Windows XP 64 bits OS. I think that's what keeps going wrong. I get to the point of installing Java and things mess up. I uninstalled it successfully using system restore this time and it seems to be back to restarting. But if I want to put Java on I'm going to have to be incredibly careful which version I pick up.

There's a few links here that I need to check through when I'm more awake

http://www.tutorials-win.com/64bit/Java-Runtime-58500/

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=646682

Couple of interesting reviews I should have read first

XP preview

mini review

Failed installation

Well this is a pain. Something I installed somewhere along the way has messed up the Windows installation I started out with. I spent a lot of yesterday restarting and getting the error message that Windows had recovered from a serious system error. I went through all the troubleshooting but it wasn't clear where the conflict lay. I uninstalled AVG at one point and that really finished it off. Whenever I tried to start I would get masses of error messages as it tried to load AVG and couldn't. Then I tried a system restore and it was upset that I'd changed the drive letters and pagefile settings.

All in all I decided to start today with reinstallation of windows. Ha. It didn't want to put it over the top of the old one, I didn't want to just repair the old one so I've currently ended up with two installations, one on C and one on D.

For the time being I'm setting up D and leaving C alone. Once I feel relatively confident D is as I want it I can reformat C. D is much bigger than C! I hadn't necessarily intended Windows to have such a big portion of my drive as I was going to install things on separate partitions and leave Windows clean. Though actually, it never seemed easy to put things elsewhere what with the X86 section and all. I might end up leaving more with Windows than I thought in which case loads of space will be better.

I'm keeping careful note of what I change and will set up system restore points more often now. I want to try and catch a trouble maker before things get so corrupted!

diary effect

I was just thinking I should log what I change as I'm setting this up, so that I know what to do another time. Rather than start yet another 'advanced diary' project or such like I realised this is probably the easiest.

What I've done so far then, is update both versions of Internet Explorer to 7.

In trying to install NLite I found that I need the .NET framework. As I started to download version 2.0 I saw 3.5 is available. One of the things I didn't like on this one was how things like .NET and Java keep leaving behind their old versions so I'm trying to install 3.5 without any earlier versions. It's cool being able to set that going and flip back here to update. I don't know if I'll keep my KVM switch long term because I miss the scroll wheel on my mouse (I've had to adapt my USB mouse to PS/2 for the KVM switch.. didn't realise I needed a USB KVM and don't even know if they exist) but for the time being running two comps side by side is kinda fun. Burning up the ozone layer though, despite that I focussed on energy efficiency, so ideally I'll just run the other one most of the time.

Definitive answer on the pagefile

I'm glad I held off, I have finally found someone who's 'internet voice' I find sounds reliable and confidence inspiring. I will follow his advice on most of the issues on the site then at least I'm following something consistent.

Optimise XP is the page that refers to the paging file.

For sorting out my old computer once the transfer has been completed and I know what is necessary I will follow this guidance: Malware removal.

I found out all about this site and other tweaks to do or not do from AMD64 site in one of the forum threads.

I've been cross with myself for taking so long setting this up but suddenly I realise it's that I want to 'get it right' and that takes time and forethought rather than charging in and sticking on the software and then uninstalling things and leaving crap all over the place.



Today I found that there isn't a 64 bit version of Pegasus, the mailer I've used ever since I first started using the internet. I did find a site that offers a conversion addon for Pegasus so I'll be thinking about which mailer to use when I'm on the other computer and might be able to convert my old pmails to something else. Generally I'm considering Thunderbird which is what my husband uses nowadays.

Just to prove how completely random a path my surfing seems to be taking me I will bookmark the WMP 11 slipstreamer here.

Now that I am running both computers and surfing on both this page is becoming ever more important for me to manage to access bookmarks from both places!