Quieting a noisy PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Just as PCs seem to (or sometimes really do) get slower as they age, PCs also tend to get louder as they age. Considering many of them are plenty loud when new, that’s not good.
When a PC is loud, it’s due to one of two types of components: hard drives or fans. The key is to isolate the noise. To do that, your best bet is to open the case, then power the computer on. Running your PC long-term with the cover off isn’t exactly good for your computer, but running it that way for a few minutes won’t hurt anything.

But before you turn the PC on, blow the dust out of it with a can of compressed air. Resist the temptation to just use a small vacuum cleaner attachment; those are static magnets. In some rare instances, just blowing the accumulated dust out will quiet the PC. In nearly all instances, it will make the PC run cooler, and it’ll make you feel better to not have all that crud accumulated inside your expensive equipment.

Loud buzzes are usually caused by failing fans; clunky noises are usually caused by a loud (and often not long for this world) hard drive.

Oiling a fan will usually quiet it and dramatically increase its life expectancy. As long as the fan hasn’t completely died, this is a good bet. It’s certainly cheaper than replacing a fan, and sometimes it’s easier. Don’t ever try to replace the fan in a power supply–oil it, very carefully, and if the noise doesn’t go away, replace the power supply. There are voltages inside power supplies that will throw you across the room, if they’re in a good mood. If they’re in a bad mood, they can potentially kill you, and I really don’t want that.

You can test a fan by stopping it with a pencil or a similarly shaped object. If the noise goes away, you’ve found your culprit.

There’s not much you can do if the hard drive is loud. I’ve heard of people taking hard drives apart and oiling them in efforts to quiet them. Don’t do that. You might well quiet the drive. You also will certainly prevent it from ever working again.

Instead, replace the drive. Modern drives run pretty quietly. Most retail-boxed drives come with free software to copy your old hard drive to the new one, making the upgrade painless. If you’ve never done this before, buy a drive at retail–an OEM drive from a clone shop or mail order outlet may be a little bit cheaper but won’t have any instructions or software–and set aside a Saturday afternoon. Even if you’ve never undertaken anything like this before, it generally doesn’t take more than a couple of hours. As of this writing, a 20 GB Maxtor drive costs $69.99 at CompUSA. The OEM version of the same drive costs $68 at Newegg.com. As you get into bigger drives, the price gap tends to increase, but for many people, 20 gigs is plenty.

Once you’ve oiled or replaced the fans and/or replaced the hard drive with a newer, faster, and quieter model, your formerly loud PC ought to run pretty quietly.

Houston is Microsoft’s problem: Alternatives to Microsoft Office

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Houston had a problem. Now it’s Microsoft’s problem.
You see, Microsoft threatened Houston with the same threat they’ve been rattling around a lot of other places. Sign a multi-million-dollar, automatic-upgrade deal for Office and other Microsoft software, or face an audit. When you’re the only game in town and you suspect people have played fast and loose with your licensing agreement, you can afford to do that.

Except the Texans stared the bully down. When Microsoft said Houston needed to cough up some bucks for office software, Houston said fine, they’d buy it from someone else.

And now that Houston is using SimDesk instead of Microsoft Office, it’s making headlines.

The city of Largo, Florida, which runs itself on a thin-client environment based on Linux and KDE, is a PR coup for Linux. But Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States. And this is turning into a PR nightmare for Microsoft–now Chicago, the third-most populous city, is also looking at SimDesk.

For less than half the money, the cities get ease of use, cross-platform compatibility, centralized offsite file storage, and longer hardware life. SimDesk stands to save Houston far more than the $7 million on paper.

But SimDesk isn’t the only other game in town. WordPerfect is still hanging on, one of the few survivors of the era when there were a dozen or more word processors, spreadsheets, and databases available for the PC. It’s still solid and capable today, and it’s a good choice if you’re looking to go a fairly traditional route. StarOffice is cheaper but still capable. The 602Suite (a.k.a. 602office) is either free or inexpensive, depending on the feature set you want.

Unfortunately, the highly regarded Gobe Productive is off the market, and efforts to raise the money to purchase the source code for the purpose of releasing it as GPL appear to have quietly failed. The good news is that the declination seem to indicate Gobe expects to have some kind of future.

If you want free, go with OpenOffice, which is StarOffice’s free, open-source twin brother. And if you’re willing to dith Office and Windows, you can run KDE and KOffice, or a variety of Gnome productivity apps, such as Evolution, AbiWord, and Gnumeric.

Most of the alternatives don’t offer all the functionality that Office includes, but few people use more than about 20% of Office’s functionality anyway. The alternatives have all of the essentials down.

The main thing tying most companies and organizations to Microsoft Office file format compatibility. An obscure piece of software called ConversionsPlus takes care of that problem. I’ve used ConversionsPlus to convert literally hundreds of files at a time to and from Microsoft Office format, and the process only takes a few minutes.

New stuff and old stuff

Dave Farquhar This weblog

New stuff. Hmm. I think I need to adopt a new stylebook…
Old stuff. And, thanks to some SQL heroics by Steve DeLassus, a couple hundred vintage posts from about a six-month span in late 2000 and early 2001 are now online here. I liberated them from my ancient site at editthispage.com (which, I guess, was Silicon Underground version 2.0). This is two generations later. As old entries gain attention I’ll give them categories and proper titles. A lot of the stuff’s obsolete but I’m sure it’ll interest someone. Last I checked, the old site was getting a hundred or two hits per day consistently.

New stuff. And speaking of old site incarnations, once I’ve decided exactly what mods I want to install and use, I’ll flip the switch on the new site, based on the latest version of b2. The most obvious improvement for most readers will be the spiffy new calendar. It’ll also bring in trackbacks and pingbacks for interaction with other blogs. It also makes some changes to make search engines happier.

The answer to the blog feedback problem is not more weblog-ese

Dave Farquhar net.culture

The talk that’s all the rage on everyone else’s weblog tonight is reader feedback. Dave Winer’s tired of keeping track of where he’s been and checking back for replies.
He doesn’t like the idea of comments as RSS feeds. It clogs up his aggregators, he says. To which I say there are days when I visit a blog and the most interesting stuff there is the reader comments. That’s the case here at least twice a month. If b2 doesn’t offer a comments RSS feed soon, I just might have to code one myself.

Winer proposed an alternate solution that made my head hurt. Way too complicated. The beauty of the comments system is its simplicity. Readers see something, they type in their name and a comment, hit a button, and it’s done. Who wants another username and password to remember? Who’s going to tell everyone they need one? There’s already way too much weblog-ese running around. Pingbacks, trackbacks, RSS, Googlejuice. Even the word “weblog” itself. Why are we always trying to make things more complicated? I’m convinced that 20% of my readers, in spite of my best efforts, think I have one page–some post I made ages ago about some hot topic, like Sotec laptops or eMachines upgrades. They read the accumulated replies, write their own, and think it’s a user forum. Many thank me for providing a place for them to ask questions or vent. Some of them venture out into my Weblog at large. Many never do.

I’m sure more weblog-ese is going to help these people tremendously.

The b2 gang has a solution to Winer’s problem as well. They’re developing a model, utilizing mature and existing Internet standards, that lets you subscribe to a post. Tick the box when you comment, then if somebody replies, you get the reply via–hold your breath–e-mail. I think most people assume comments systems work that way anyway. Set up an e-mail address that you use for comments and only for comments, and you’ve got your solution.

I’m sure that’s way too simple though. It always is.

More changes on the way

Dave Farquhar This weblog , ,

I’m playing with b2 0.61, which comes very close to feature parity with Movable Type. The only thing MT has that made me jealous that this newest version of b2 doesn’t is allowing multiple categories per post, which is something. I remember a Ted Williams tribute I wrote after he died that someone told me belongs in “human interest” rather than “baseball”–permitting multiple categories neatly fixes that problem.
But pingbacks and trackbacks are there, so I can interact with other blogs and they can interact with me, which is good.

On another front, I’ve managed to pull down all of my old content from editthispage.com (October 2000-April 2001), which Steve DeLassus and I are trying to massage into a form suitable for importing here. I did it in a very crude fashion–I set my display preferences to display 365 entries on the front page, then I downloaded my page with wget and I manually stripped out the obvious cruft. Very inelegant but it mostly works.

As for the custom b2 code Steve wrote, I’m getting closer to getting it into a form that’s distributable. The PHP calendar he modified for my use is history, replaced with one by Alex King that integrates more nicely with the rest of b2 and follows Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility guidelines nicely.

Running a Web site without static IP with Linux and DynDNS

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

I run this Web site without a static IP address. I registered an address at DynDNS.org which, as long as I keep it updated, keeps me on the ‘Net.
In the past I’ve used a Windows-based program to keep my address updated. But the hard drive in that Windows box took leave of its life a few days ago. Somehow my IP address didn’t change for a few days, but then my DSL modem fell off the ‘Net.

Then I found setup instructions for Debian and Dyndns, which solved that problem. There’s a Dyndns client in Debian now, which this document explains, so now my Web server can keep itself online without any help from a Windows box and without me writing any nasty code.

Now, I haven’t tested this theory, but I suspect one could use DynDNS plus DHCP or PPPoE to run a Web site with a registered domain name without paying the extra monthly fee for a static IP address. The trick would be to set up your registered name’s DNS record as a CNAME to your DynDNS name.

Setting up the DNS records is left as an exercise to the reader, mostly because my understanding of it is good enough for me to do it myself, but not to explain it–when I’ve tried in the past, all I’ve succeeded in doing was confusing both of us.

If this isn’t real Christianity, it’s really close

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I’m a bit disillusioned today. Actually the last few days. I don’t deal well with pride and elitism.
Then I read something.

I’m not above a good fight, but I was so tired. I’d been fighting fundamentalist Christians for 20 years, had left my denomination, and had washed ashore with the only congregation that would have someone like me as their pastor. I didn’t have any fight left in me.

So I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“[expletive] A, man. [expletive]-A.”

I have found over the years that with some people, a well-placed “F-bomb” is the best pastoral move I can make. It’s like a conversational “Ctrl-Alt-Delete”. If nothing else works, just reboot and start over.

It’s the story of a hard-cussing preacher and one of his friends. It made me uncomfortable. So did the implied attitude that all you have to do to be a Christian is show up in church on Sunday.

But he had a real point: Show up. Leave the door cracked a little and see if God walks in. You don’t make yourself a Christian. God makes you a Christian.

As for the implication that all you have to do is show up on Sunday, read his own story and you see otherwise. So that apprehension was misguided. And he had Sundays right. Show up. Listen. Sing. Pray. Talk to people. Help put stuff away.

I used to have a church like that and I miss it. The Preacher is one of the most profane blogs I’ve seen. But he’s not wearing a mask. He even says he doesn’t necessarily believe in God all the time. He’s honest and he’s real, and that’s refreshing. I like him even if he makes me a little uncomfortable.

Read about The Preacher and George yourself. Then read The Preacher’s own story.