Solid Blog of Ise I think my toes are jealous of my fingers because they get to point at things

As if I haven’t already extolled the virtues of occasionally cleaning out the dust from your computer to keep it running, here’s another example of how NOT to do it. Got this beast in. Owner complained of unstable behavior, grinding noises and general unpleasantness.

Opened it up and it was covered with thick dust inside. Capacitors had started to swell, fans were trying to plow through the dust-clogged frames. Essentially this thing was a huge firehazard waiting to happen. It had been stuck in a bedroom-corner (we asked) somewhere for most of it’s 7+ year life and finally it couldn’t breathe any longer. Complete write-off, it was essentially DOA and there wasn’t much we could do to save it. Even the harddrive sounded like it was grinding gears.

Yeah, crappy photos. My old phone got some kind of zap due to the strong sunlight that was shining in on my workspace.

Ah, the server-room. Or closet, might be a more correct name. It currently contains five machines, of which two are actually running.

The first one is Darklands. The trusty ol’ workhorse that has been around for some seven years now. She’s had her guts (and chassi) changed a few times, but she’s still ticking. Running virtually 24/7, with downtime only for routine maintenance or reboots when a new kernel has been released, she’s mostly trustworthy. Occasionally she has some hiccups, but most of the time she chugs along. She powers a variety of services, the most prominent being various web-related stuff, such as this blog and some friends domains and blogs.

Blackbox belongs to my good friend Micke. He pays me to keep her here, and she’s by far the most powerful of the bunch. Core i7 and 16 gigs of RAM, she’s used for some clandestine project he’s working on. Oh, and for hosting a Minecraft-server.

Then there’s the three proper rack-mounted servers. Two x346 (to the right) and one lone x345 to the left. They’re made by IBM, and they’re proper servers with redundant power-supplies, hotswappable SCSI-harddrives. The works. The one farthest to the right is a x346 named “Valentine” and the plan is to co-locate her somewhere, and retire Darklands after that has happened. Unfortunately, finding decently priced co-lo turned out to be quite tricky, so for now she rests in here. The other 346 is going to be spare parts for Valentine, and the 345 I don’t quite know what to do with. Being proper servers they’re also hideously noisy, as demonstrated in my video where I fire up the x345. Being proper servers they’re also astoundingly heavy, each one weighs more than Darklands and Blackbox together.

So, today at work I was slaving over hot computers. I get a stationary piece of metal that according to the sheet doesn’t start at all – no display, no nothing. Nada, zip, null.

I hook it up and let ‘er rip. Yeah, nothing at all happens. I notice that the vent on the side is somewhat dusty, so I yank the side off and it’s a horrorshow inside. Everything is covered in thick, grey dust. I didn’t bother snapping any photos, because when you’ve seen one dustmonster you’ve pretty much seen them all. I simply sigh, unplug everything from it and take it outside for a good blast of compressed air.

Some ten minutes later it’s about a bazillion times cleaner (and the air-compressor is working hard maintaining pressure) so I take the thing back inside. I half expect it to happily boot up, thanks to being able to breathe again. Believe me, it wouldn’t be the first time such a simple thing as compressed air saves a dead/dying machine.

However, what I do get when I plug it back in and flip the switch is a loud popping sound, flashing sparks and the acrid smell of ozone and burning electronics. About the first thing I do is yell “HOLY HELL!” followed a split-second later by me yanking the power out of the sizzling monster.

So what had happened?

Dust had clogged the fan on the video-card, stopping it dead. This in turn meant the card overheated, melting the plastic fan assembly. This also led to some circuit overloading which caused the popping sound and flashing sparks.

So, take this as a warning. I know I bitch and moan a lot about keeping your computer somewhat neat and tidy, but this is the reality of what might happen if you neglect doing routine maintenance every month or so. Your computer MIGHT start producing sparks and setting something on fire.

Oh, and for reference – this videocard in question is an old ATI x700. Not even the “Pro” variety. It’s not a high-performance card by any measure –not even when it was new– and it’s cooled by a tiny little noisy fan. Modern video-cards (especially the high-performance models) output a lot more heat and use a lot more electricity than this little tubthumper.

The whole card as a reference point.

The melted fan-assembly. Yes, this is a piece of crap by any measure, but that’s what happens when the fan fails. Note the dust buildup that even a thorough blowout didn’t get rid of.


BZZZT! See the black stains around the circuit, and the white spot on it? That’s where it more or less literally exploded, shot sparks in every direction and caused a foul smell similar to burning hair and troll-fart. I’m fairly sure this is a voltage-regulator of some kind, but I might be mistaken.

So what happened to the machine? Well, it survived the ordeal with a burned-out card as shown above, and a blown power-supply. This was lucky, considering the nasty dusty state of the machine. I mostly expected it to be a complete write-off.

How many people use their optical drives today? Sure, one is included in virtually every new computer whether it’s a stationary or portable one – but how many actually need and use these drives on a regular basis?

I’m a fairly conservative kind of guy when it comes to computing habits, and even I can almost count the times I’ve used my optical drive the last year using the fingers of one hand. This is provided I can actually remember the times, since they’re so sporadic and unmemorable. I doubt I’ve used my optical drive more than maybe 5-6 times the last year.

I kept onto my floppy-drive for quite a while until I finally gave up on it since the purposes it had served had in turn been replaced by much more convenient methods of data transfer. In fact, the only purpose it had served for the last four years of it’s life was BIOS-upgrades – nothing else. You can’t exactly transfer a lot of data on 1.44 megabytes. But after a while even this was replaced. Bootable CDs and later by bootable USB thumb-drives.

And now the optical drive is facing the electronic scrap-heap. Cloud Computing is all the rage today, transferring data through the intarwebs rather than on crude physical media. No more discs, no more floppies. Just smooth data-transfer worldwide through the all-encompassing ‘net.

Me and a coworker talked briefly about this the other day. He mentioned that a lot of people shied away from buying a computer with no optical drive. I was surprised, since like him I felt that the optical drive was losing it’s purpose in computing. Even us enthusiasts rarely use the optical drive. Sure, in our line of work the optical drive is used for booting troubleshooting systems, but even this is becoming replaced by the vastly more convenient USB thumb-drive. They hold more data, they’re much more flexible and they’re superior in speed.

Yet still people apparently want them in computers. What do they do with them? Do people really use them? Hell, a lot of software these days are digitally distributed. Just look at things like Steam, who deliver your gaming pleasure completely unfettered by plastic discs. Who buys software on a disc any longer?

My coworker commented that most people would probably be fine without an optical drive. Just buy a 10-dollar thumb drive instead for when you have to transfer data. If push comes to shove, you can always buy a USB-connected optical drive.

So, how often do YOU use your optical drive?

Yeah yeah, another picture from work. I just don’t have anything more insightful to write about now, so give it a rest.

This, boys and girls, is what a computer looks like inside after it’s been in a fire. Well, not literally in a fire, but inside a building with a fire in the adjacent room or something.

I don’t know the whole story behind this thing, but I do know that it reeked worse than a severe chain-smoker, and it was filled with soot and ash when I opened it up. Not a pretty sight, and we could safely tell the insurance company that this bugger was a complete write-off.

We salvaged the foul-smelling harddrive though, and that had survived the ordeal which was a happy ending. But the rest of the machine was, well, completely smoked.

Today at work I needed to keep two failing drives somewhat cool long enough to allow me to copy the stuff off of them. First the old trick of putting the drives inside the freezer for an hour or two. The problem turned out to be keeping them cool long enough to copy the 400+ gigabytes of stuff onto a new drive.

Solution: An icebox-cooler I found in the freezer + some random CPU-cooler + random cabling to make the CPU-cooler work.

Believe it or not, but it actually works. Behold:

A good many years ago I took, edited and published the below photo of my real-life desktop. I think this is from 2001 or somewhere around there.

So anyway, I decided that it might be fun to show my current hideaway. I added some captions in a similar style.

I find it interesting to note that these days I seem to prefer less of a “creative chaos” approach in my workspace. It’s still fairly cluttered, but I try to keep it somewhat orderly. Also, not having a huge computer and dual CRT-monitors help in keeping clutter down.