Heatsink/Fan for PIII

[kony]

On 28 Jul 2004 07:54:22 -0700,

Yeah, I thought it could be a BIOS setting, but I don't see anything
obvious there. The voltages the BIOS states all look fine (all within
10% of the proper voltages I think), I can't check right now (I'm not
at home at the moment, hence my Google Groups usage).

MIght be something similar to 'fast post' or 'quick boot', might
not have any mention of "memory".

Yes, I was thinking that too. It could be on its last legs for all I
know, and I hate the way Win2k's Chkdisk thing tells you absolutely
NOTHING when scanning disks for errors. I think I have Seagate's own
diagnostic checking thing on a disk somewhere, but I have nothing to
check if that Fujitsu HDD - and I did find a few bad sectors on it
when I got it last year (for nothing, of course). The broken pin on
the IDE socket on that Fujitsu (it was dislocated from the PCB, but I
bent it back so it was resting on it) doesn't really make me put any
more faith in it either. Oh, yeah, and the fact it's over 4 years
old...

If it's still soldered on good and fairly straight, the pin
should be fine. Age though is a factor that can't be overcome.
If you want more feedback from scanning you might try Norton
Utilites Scandisk (think "scandisk" is what they call it, or
maybe "Disk Doctor"). I am assuming it scans NTFS in addition to
FAT32, you might seek scanners as I'm sure there are some better
than chkdisk when it comes to providing feedback.

Would a new HDD add that much heat to the PC?

No, it is quite possible the new drive is hotter by a few watts,
but it's not much of an issue to rest of system, rather you might
need to evaluate the flow past the drive, make sure your case's
airflow is sufficient. Touch-testing is often enough, if it
feels too hot it probably is.

I was thinking of an
80GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, or a similar WD Caviar. Please take
into account I'll be taking out one of the old drives too (or maybe
both), of course.

I'd pick the Seagate, especially now that some of their drives
have 5 year warranty... hope the rest of the industry follows
suit soon.

Thanks Kony, for all the really useful help and advice in my
"adventures" of upgrading my crap PC to a slightly less crap PC.

I hate to use the word "crap" for a performance level, since it
only need be fast enough for the jobs YOU need to run. Crap to
me is parts that are too loud or technically flawed, with high
failure rate or potential damage to other components when they
fail. I'd rather rely on a solid PII 400 system than a 2GHz with
a generic power supply. That is, if I had only one system....

 

[~misfit~]

If you want more feedback from scanning you might try Norton
Utilites Scandisk (think "scandisk" is what they call it, or
maybe "Disk Doctor").

I'd just like to say here that if your using Norton Utilities I seriuosly
wouldn't advise using 'Speedisk' on an older disk. In fact I wouldn't use it
on any HDD again. It thrashes around, rearranging files, ostensibly speeding
up access times and loading times for frequently-used programs. It can take
a very long time and it really works your HDD. I had four identical drives,
8GB Seagates, all bought at the same time, in different machines. Installed
Norton Systemworks 2003 on two of them and used Speedisk often. It has a
pretty display and I wanted to see if it really made a difference opening
programs. I figured it had to 'collect data' about which programs I used
often so I ran the program often.

You guessed it. Both those HDDs died within a couple of months. That program
thrashes the hell out of them. You could think that they were on their way
out anyway but I still have the other two, still running fine, no bad
sectors. And you know what? Speedisk didn't speed up my program loading time
one bit! (Head-to-head test with otherwise completely identical machine) If
I was a cynic/conspiracy theorist I'd say that the HDD manufacturers pay
Norton to include that POS software in their suite.

Disk Doctor and Cleansweep seem to be Ok but frankly my copys of Systemworks
aren't installed on any machines and the CD's are sitting in my drawer
gathering dust. Now and then I run the "One button check up" from CD that
checks registry entries etc.

JMO/E

 

[kony]

I'd just like to say here that if your using Norton Utilities I seriuosly
wouldn't advise using 'Speedisk' on an older disk. In fact I wouldn't use it
on any HDD again. It thrashes around, rearranging files, ostensibly speeding
up access times and loading times for frequently-used programs. It can take
a very long time and it really works your HDD. I had four identical drives,
8GB Seagates, all bought at the same time, in different machines. Installed
Norton Systemworks 2003 on two of them and used Speedisk often. It has a
pretty display and I wanted to see if it really made a difference opening
programs. I figured it had to 'collect data' about which programs I used
often so I ran the program often.

You guessed it. Both those HDDs died within a couple of months. That program
thrashes the hell out of them. You could think that they were on their way
out anyway but I still have the other two, still running fine, no bad
sectors. And you know what? Speedisk didn't speed up my program loading time
one bit! (Head-to-head test with otherwise completely identical machine) If
I was a cynic/conspiracy theorist I'd say that the HDD manufacturers pay
Norton to include that POS software in their suite.

Disk Doctor and Cleansweep seem to be Ok but frankly my copys of Systemworks
aren't installed on any machines and the CD's are sitting in my drawer
gathering dust. Now and then I run the "One button check up" from CD that
checks registry entries etc.

JMO/E

Interesting, I've never had any issue like that with past systems
running Speeddisk but I only ran it every couple months or so,
more or less depending on the system. Don't think it was
Systemworks 2003 though, just the Utilities Suite (maybe it was
part of Systemworks in the past too, don't know), was probably
2001 or 2002 version. Although, I used to set it so it
optimized based on recent access (or modified?) right after clean
install of OS and apps, running each, then didn't use the date
stamps as a parameter for optimizing anymore, as that seemed to
rearrange everything, shifting files slightly further up or down
in hierarchy which meant little to no performance difference but
rewriting multiple times as many files.

One thing I do find valueable about Disk Doctor and Speed Disk is
when 48LBA dependant HDDs are using on WIn9x, as Win9x's Scandisk
and Defrag simply won't handle > 128GB.