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A Laptop with no CMOS
battery... how do we reset this?: November 2015:
You can read the whole blog post here:
Or watch the Youtube video:
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September saw me powering up my small hoard of computers and getting them crunching again after being left abandoned for the warm summer months. I basically had to strip down and rebuild four computers, cleaning out dust, and then juggling graphics cards with power supplies – my Nvidia 680 had a slight hiccup in the process but that resolved itself, and I got my 550W PSU to power two 460s… for a while at least. Sadly, during some shuffling of my twin 460 rig, one of the graphics cards decided to stop working – it powers up but there is no display output, and it wont crunch. I think this was down to me not being so careful with the shuffling, since that card was strapped to a piece of wood with cable ties, and then strapped to the side of the case and linked to the PCI-express socket via a rise cable, similar to this (it keeps the cards cooler when one is out of the case):
So after having the luck of the 680 almost dying and then not, I have still ended up being a GPU down… but luckily it’s “only a 460” – relatively inexpensive, not so efficient or a great cruncher compared to newer cards. Throughout October my RAC (Recent Average Credit) increased from 25K to 50K where it has now plateaued – I’m still not leaving all rigs on 24/7 as I’m just using them to keep rooms warm during the day, and leaving my house nice and quiet during the night.
I’m now just scraping in the Top 20 in the team I’m in (GPUUG). I still want to make more headway in the UK rankings – I’m currently 7th in the Total Credit list, but not yet in the Top 10 with my RAC at less than 50K. According to BOINCstats it will take me over a year to overtake the person (Gone) currently in 6th who is no longer participating, and I’m soon to be overtaken by someone who’s RAC is 4x higher than mine – even with all my computers on 24/7 I can do nothing about that, so until then I will drop to 8th.
You can read the full topic here: |
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I still use Microsoft FrontPage (2002 with SP3) for some websites I maintain and work on. I have this issue with one particular website I update regularly whereby some code just keeps duplicating each time I add something new, so I end up with sections of this stuff in the HTML…
The page consists of a list of tables with news items in. Each time I need to add some new news to the page I copy an existing table and paste it at the top of the list, and put the new news in it. When the page gets too long I move some of the older news to another page. Each page seems to then gradually spawn this extra code over time… each time I edit the page some new lines get added to the HTML code behind the scenes until the page becomes sluggish to edit – FrontPage takes a lot of CPU processing to cut and paste the tables, and that’s when I notice the problem escalating and I have to go in and delete these extra lines of: <center dir=”ltr”> The pages also grow in KB too, gaining some 10KB extra with all of this extra bumph. I don't have a solution for this other than do delve into the HTML and delete all the extra code. I also have an issue with table borders in Firefox which you can read about here: [link] |
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I last blogged about my efforts as a participant in the SETI@home project back in February (see above) when I passed the 100,000,000 credit mark. However, as the weather began warming up in March I started switching most of my computers off, and so my RAC (recent average credit) dropped from 90K to less than 3K.
Gone were the days of leaving as many computers on as possible throughout the UK summer and sweating my socks off. It was strange – when I moved into my own house I thought I would enjoy being able to leave more computers on 24/7/365 but the reality of paying my own electricity bill coupled with a greener mind, made me think otherwise after the first year. However, now the cooler weather has been slowly returning I’ve been gradually switching things back on, and my RAC has been on its way back up throughout September.
Switching computers on after six months hasn’t been without its problems though, especially I think since one or two of them had been operating in dusty rooms that were (and still are) undergoing renovations at the time of their last use. This one I stripped down and rebuilt, before powering it back on, since it didn’t look too healthy:
Sadly, after a week of running, my top graphics card, an Nvidia 680 decided to start misbehaving and I feared my fire-power would be significantly handicapped. I tried it in other computers and with other PSUs, but it still kept spinning its fans up to 100% when under full load, exceeding its TDP by 25% before crashing the system. Strangely though, by the time I decided, as a last-ditch-attempt, to try it with my best PSU, it was behaving itself again, and would work again in its original computer. Very strange. Another week went by and then my poorest PSU ceased to work (a reminder not to skimp on brands where power supplies are concerned) – it stated on the label that it was capable of supplying 30A on its 12V rail, but I suspected this wasn’t true, and I only ever taxed it with my least-hungry GPU, an Nvidia 460. Having started to crunch more regularly I’ve already seen myself re-climb the rankings in the team I’m in (GPUUG), and I’ve gone from being a 25%er to a 1%er again – the SETI@home project automatically designates these awards:
My target now is to gain a place in the UK stats, or rather, re-take the 6th place spot since ic-hep flew up the rankings and overtook all but one of us.
The person in 6th no longer participates, so once I pass them, gaining more places will depend on what RAC my computers are now all worthy of – if I can get my RAC max’d out by the end of the year then I may persuade myself to add another rig/GPU to my arsenal.
You can read the full topic here: |
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