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Welcome to the artissimo.gr pages of News ! |
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English Language : Music Technology : News : Spring 2004 
Sunday 30 May 2004 : Dust : A Personal Computer Enemy ! |
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Experiences So, what does a personal computer (PC) have to do with our artissimo webpage ? Well, nowadays, PC is an integral part of a modern musician's artistic arsenal. So, anyone who would like to improve his output should know how to use one. It can help him in all phases of composition including the initial conception itself ! But let's leave these discussions for another time. Our main theme is the dust ! Dust can harm computer and cause various hardware problems. Just listen to my latest adventure concerning this issue :  Last winter, my computer started to "freeze" with no apparent reason. As the problem occurred rather rarely, I didn't cope with it at that time. Then, the spring came and my personal computer was still suffering occasional crashes ! As I had also problems with the USB hub (notice : a USB hub gives many USB independent ports) and those freezes happened to occur then I was using the USB hub, I thought it was fair to conclude that that peripheral was the one to blame for the crashes ! So, I gave it back to be tested and possibly replaced (its warranty was valid then). But - uf! - crashes were not over ! - only to be there even more often as the weather was getting more and more hot (I live in Greece you know - that's why we are talking about artissimo.gr ! :-) ). Then, I thought it was the brand new audio card to be accussed of causing all these problems. But when audio card was being disabled, crashes were still there ! Recently, I happened to notice at my "crash-log" text that usually all those incidents were taking place when PC had already been working for several hours ! Hm, this is smelling overheat, you know ! Motherboard's auxiliary monitoring tool had been indicating that Central Processing Unit (CPU) is getting more and more hot when - for example - a very lengthy WinZip operation takes place. But all those "debugging" data could not be assembled together so that a conclusion could be taken about the cause of the failures ! All those were happening till today : I was quite happy in the position of almost starting to listen to one of Beethoven's famous string quartets and was just backing up data to finally shut down the PC, when, then, that was totally frozen ! It was (almost! :-) ) the millionth time that this happened so I just decided to cope with it more intensively ! Then, I thought about DUST ! I happen to live at a street with a lot of DUST, so, what actually about DUST ? Perhaps, this was the one to put the blame on and not any peripheral incompatibilities or even bad system tuning ! I opened the PC case and had a look at the Central Processing Unit's (CPU's) cooler ! DUST DUST : TONS OF DUST EVERYWHERE !!! (**) So, that was the real problem ! Generally speaking, when performing hardware "debugging", finding the cause is usually equivalent to finding the solution as well (except the fact that this usually leaves you poorer than before :-) ) : getting out the dust was very easy (toothpicks and such stuff did actually good work!) and then I just had to test it ! Well, after all these adventures I was totally aware of the methods of getting a CPU extremely hot !  So far, so good ! No crashes - no freezes and the summer is coming ! Let's prepare to meet it with a feather broom ! :-) (***) (**) PC had been working there for at least 2 years without having his CPU cooler being cleaned even once. (***) At an older PC of mine, it was a damage in the CPU cooler power supply that caused system to crash occasionally in the summer. I had been trying hard to find out the cause of those crashes then. Some days later, PC started to freeze again and again. Eventually, it looks like ventilation inside PC case is not good enough any more : a simple solution is to remove the one side of the cover in the summer ! :-) In a very last attempt, I installed two additional fans at the case chassis. Results were more than impressive ! Extra noise made by them, too ! :-) |
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