PC or not PC

I started building my new PC

Yes, it is time for my once-a-decade PC build project. Terrifying. Enough time has passed since the previous build that I’ve almost forgotten that each time I do this, I swear I will never do it again.

All the parts are gathered. I cleared a space. I grounded myself, both against static and mentally. I put down the motherboard on the space I’d cleared (I planned to install everything on the motherboard before putting it in the case, save for the video card). I peeled all the plastic film off parts of it, something I’d never had to do on a motherboard before. I installed the ram (I used my iPhone’s Magnifier app to read the correct slot layout on the PCB).

And then I stopped, because the SSDs were next and the quick start guide that came with the motherboard seemed to not mention anything about how to install these and it was not immediately obvious, as the M.2 slots were hidden with shrouds and heat sinks and whatnot, with no clear way (to me) to access them. I contemplated looking online.

Then I actually just called it quits. For the day. Apparently my patience for this sort of thing has ebbed a bit since the last time.

But a friend with the same motherboard1This is why it’s handy to buy components that friends own offered tips and I’m ready to go for the next attempt. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe!

The motherboard in question, an ASRock 870E NOVA. I may have called it a mother*** a few times.

My weird display(port) issue

UPDATE, The Next Day:  Turned on the PC this morning (it is running Linux Mint at the moment) and the left monitor (HDMI) was working normally. When I powered on the right monitor (DisplayPort, but different cable), it was flashing and not working, so same behavior as before. It eventually went dark after 5-10 minutes. I turned the monitor off, then back on again and it started up normally. This suggests the cable is either not the issue or I indeed have two bad DP cables. I may try going full HDMI before the end of the day to see what happens tomorrow.

For a while now, I have been experiencing some weirdness with my displays. I have two 27″ monitors, both the same model, connected as follows:

  • PC: DisplayPort
  • Mac: HDMI

The weirdness does not happen on the Mac, so it seems related to DisplayPort (DP) somehow (maybe), but the cause could be:

  • Windows 11
  • Bad DP cable
  • Bad video card
  • Bad monitor

So far, I have determined the following:

  • Windows 11
  • Bad DP cable (maybe–see below)
  • Bad video card
  • Bad monitor

Because the issue happens in Linux Mint, which is like the anti-Windows, it doesn’t seem to be an OS issue. What exactly is happening, you ask? Several things, each horrible in its own special way!

  • The right monitor will sometimes glitch out after being turned on in the morning. The screen will flicker madly, and then sometimes lose signal altogether. If left alone, it eventually will start working normally. Usually rebooting the PC will also fix it.
  • Sometimes both monitors will lose the DP signal entirely and just go blank. I don’t know if the signal recovers on its own in this situation, but some testing suggests that if it does, it takes longer than I’m willing to wait (hours, at least).
  • Something I just noticed today: The DP and HDMI (to Mac) connectors on the back of the right monitor will get very warm, even hot, after a while. They remain cool (normal) on the left monitor. This, along with a dead pixel on the right monitor, leads me to think the right monitor is ailing, even if it isn’t the ultimate culprit.

Tonight I lost the DP signal on the left monitor, which is unusual, but it happened after swapping DP cables, so maybe there is a bad cable. I have cast the possibly bad DP cable aside, but don’t have a spare one that will reach to replace it, so right now the PC is connected with a combo of DP and HDMI. The DP cable that is now connected to the right monitor is the one previously connected to the left, so it may be good. Or “good.” But as noted above, I’ve sometimes lost signal on both monitors, which would mean two bad cables (theoretically possible) or, more likely, a bigger piece of hardware has gone awry. Or gremlins and gnomes are involved.

Anyway, I’ll see what happens, but for the moment both monitors are working and nothing seems to be getting super hot (yet). I will shut the monitors off when I go to bed and see what horrors await me in the morning when I turn them back on.

The best case scenario is that it is just a bad DP cable. The worst case is pretty much anything else, because both the monitor and video card would be very expensive to replace.

Computers are fun1They are! It’s actually rare for me to have hardware issues, so it’s especially annoying when they happen, particularly when the cause is uncertain..

The difference 26 MHz used to make

When I got my first PC in 1994 (30 years ago!) I had to choose between Intel or AMD for the CPU. I chose AMD because their Am486 DX-40 CPU was both faster than the 33 MHz Intel equivalent, and cheaper. Win-win!

It served me well for several years.

Around the same time, a friend of mine, flush with money earned by working on the railroad (all the live long day) also got his own PC, but because he was Mr. Moneypants, he got a tricked out Intel 486 CPU running at 66 MHz.

We both had the game Crusader: No Remorse, which came out in 1995 and remains one of my favourite PC games of all time, despite having a shall we say, somewhat inelegant control scheme.

You can’t see any in the screenshot below, but if you look at the flashing red light on the wall, it’s about the same size as fans you would see spinning away in the game, as fans do. And this is where I saw that 26 MHz could make a big difference–on my friend’s PC, the fans spun smoothly. On mine, they hitched, like the wiring in them was funky or something. It made me a bit sad, and a little jealous.

Crusader: No Remorse (1995). Not shown: The million exploding barrels littering most levels.

Today, 26 MHz is about as relevant to CPUs as the first horseless carriages are to today’s electric vehicles, but back in the 1990s every new processor (save budget models) brought significant, noticeable speed boosts. It was in that environment that tech sites like AnandTech flourished, and I can see why it and other similar sites are dying off now–today, most people buy laptops and just deal with whatever it has when it comes to gaming (unless they are hardcore enough to seek out gaming laptops), or you have the enthusiast/gamer market where people aren’t looking for all-around good systems, but ones that can excel at playing very demanding games, cost oodles of money and have enough lights on them to be seen from space.

But yeah, for a time, if you wanted smoothly spinning fans in your games, a couple of hundred dollars more could buy you that.

The fun of getting inside a PC

I forgot to take pictures, so enjoy this stock image instead! Photo by Nathan b Caldeira

Yes, the title is part sarcasm. But only part, because the worst part of adding an internal 2.5 inch SATA SSD to my PC was getting the computer to sit on the set of wheels I use to keep it off the carpet (to reduce dust ingress). I eventually gave up on the wheel and now the PC is elevated on a sturdy box.

But I missed that two opposing wheels were still locked (my bad), so I’ll probably go back to the wheels eventually.

As for the installation, I was smart enough to make sure I had all parts before proceeding, then gave the internals of the PC a good cleaning (minimal dust since the last time). Once ready for the work I gathered the needed tools and took the PC to the kitchen counter, where I could work in good light and at a sensible height. This helped so much that I did not use any colourful metaphors during the installation.

The drive was successfully installed and will now be (at least temporarily) the home for my Linux adventures. The reason for going internal is the external drive (an M2. SSD in an enclosure and connected via USB 3.0) would very occasionally lose connection to the system, which means the OS just kind of dies and could get corrupted, etc. So right now that drive is going to be more like phat temporary storage or something.

I’ll have another post about my Linux misadventures soon.™

Also, I’ve decided that when I eventually build my next PC, I’m going all out on internal connections on the motherboard, no matter the expense. What I want:

  • Probably 3 M.2 slots for SSDs. Yes, 3! I don’t want to run out of internal storage, and I don’t want to have to plug in external storage.
  • But if I do need to plug things, in I want USB-C and not just internal headers, but at least 1-2 external ports supporting a minimum of 20 GB transfer speed.
  • Maybe even Thunderbolt or USB 4 to go all the way to 40 GB.
  • And covered in RGB lighting! Just kidding. I do not want my PC to be a source of light.

Why am I considering Linux again?

Am I going a little loopy? Have I been bribed by the Linux penguin? Do I like mint so much that I want an OS named Mint, too?

The answer is: I’m not sure!

After my PC experienced a near-death experience on Saturday (August 20, 2023, for people or bots reading this in the far future) I had time to think about my options while waiting for its miraculous recovery:

  • I currently can’t afford a new PC, so I was hoping I’d only have to replace some of it to get it going again (fortunately the miracle recovery meant I didn’t need anything)
  • It made me wonder how much some aspect of Windows, specifically, was responsible for The Incident
  • It made me further wonder if I had been running, say, some version of Linux, if The Incident would have happened at all.

The answer to the latter is I just don’t know. My theory, that some app or process pegged the CPU at 100%, causing the system to overheat and the fans to spin up and roar like supersonic jets, is just that, a theory. I will probably never know precisely what happened. But it really has me thinking more about ditching Windows for good, and how to best address the deficiencies I previously found in Linux Mint.

And so I ponder. Again.

NedPC-2019 reborn!

Today, I girded myself for the troubleshooting I’d need to do to figure out what had possibly killed my PC. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Unplugged everything.
  2. Plugged the PC into my old 24″ monitor.
  3. Attached a wired keyboard and mouse.
  4. Turned the PC on.
  5. PC booted up normally, no error messages or anything.

Yes, it acted like nothing had happened. I took it back into the office, reconnected it, and I am currently typing on it. Event Viewer in Windows doesn’t reveal anything particularly revealing to suggest what happened. My best guess is that after I left early in the morning to go birding, something bad happened and since I was out all day, it was unable to resolve itself.

What happened? No idea. Vague theory:

  1. A program or process pegged the CPU at 100% and kept it there indefinitely. This caused the CPU fan to spin up to jet speed and it kept spinning like that.
  2. As the PC grew ever-hotter, it began to shut down applications and functions, until basically the PC was on, but nothing was actually running.
  3. When I got back and shut down the PC, it was too hot to power back up.
  4. Giving it time to cool off allowed it to reboot normally. Since the rogue app or process would have been killed in the process, it started up as if nothing had gone wrong.

Now, I don’t know if this is really what happened, but it feels right, or at least right-ish.

The question is, do I shut down my PC at night and start it up in the morning, or just keep running it 24/7 as per usual and assume the shutdown/freeze was a one-time thing? Decisions!

But at least for now, it is working, and that deserves a cat:

NedPC-2019, RIP 2019-2023

While I like to think I’m being dramatic with the title of this post, it is quite possible my current PC, which I built in the Before Times of April 2019, may, in fact, be dead.

When I went out birding yesterday around 8 a.m. it was working normally. When I returned around 4:30 p.m. I heard a loud fan roaring in the bedroom office. My first thought was the actual Dyson fan, but it was still set to a low speed and barely audible. The noise was coming from the PC. I observed a few things:

  • The displays had switched from the PC (on DisplayPort) to the Mac (on HDMI).
  • The aforementioned high-pitched fan noise.
  • The CTRL keyboard was off–it was still connected to the PC, but the backlight was off, indicating it was getting no power.
  • The CPU’s RGB lighting (a rather ominous-looking red ring) was still on.

I tried turning the PC off using the power switch on the front. No response. I tried the reset button, also no response.

I then hit the power switch on the PSU itself, and this did power the PC off.

It has yet to restart since. It appears to be getting no power at all, so my suspicion is either the PSU died (bad) or the motherboard or some component on it went (worse). I’ll be doing some testing today. I’m sure it will be a delight.

For the moment, though, I am a Mac-only guy1Technically I still have my ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but other than the keyboard, which is a decadent luxury for a laptop keyboard, I don’t really enjoy using it much.

New PC 2018: Parts chosen (until I change my mind)

Ironic note: This post was written on a Mac mini.

My current PC is about five years old and truthfully, it still does most things I need it to do without any major issues. I can browse the web, check email, write, read, play games, chat and so on, all without gnashing my teeth about the system being infernally slow, laggy or otherwise annoying to use.

It has an SSD as the main drive, so Windows 10 boots and restarts quickly (even if I notice that the Thinkpad X1 Carbon boots Windows 10 and programs even faster). It has 8 GB of ram, which still allows multitasking of as many programs as I’m likely to run. Its 4th generation Core i5 CPU is officially five generations behind, but it’s clocked at 3.3 GHz and still capable.

In the time I’ve had the PC, I’ve only upgraded three components:

  • The monitor, which isn’t even directly part of the PC. I went from a 24″ Samsung TN panel to a 24″ Asus IPS monitor, and the change was totally worth it. The color, clarity, viewing angles and brightness of an IPS monitor are so much better than a TN display. I still have the Samsung as an emergency backup.
  • The video card, from a GeForce GTX 570 to a GTX 770. This was also worth it, though I bungled things by not doing enough research, as the even-better GTX 970 came out just weeks after I got the 770.
  • The OS, from Windows 8 to Windows 10. And technically this isn’t a component of the PC, anyway.

Apart from that, the system is exactly the same as the day I put it together. I’m even using the same 2 TB hard disk from the previous PC as the secondary drive in the current one.

So with everything working, why build a new system?

The best answer might be that while everything works, I am starting to see the upper limits of what the current PC can manage. As programs–and especially browsers–become more bloated demanding, the 8 GB of ram is becoming an issue. Having a small primary drive (256 GB) is slowing down overall performance when loading and saving, because I simply don’t have room for everything on it. Older and less demanding games can still run fine on the GTX 770, but more often I have to turn down settings, accept lower framerates, or just play stuff released 10 years ago. Which Diablo 3 halfway to, luckily.

Also, we are at a point where technologies and pricing have both stabilized with some really good offerings.

If I stick to what I’ve picked out, here’s how the new system will compare to the current PC:

  • 4x the storage on the primary drive (1 TB vs. 256 GB). I would add additional storage on an as-needed basis.
  • 2x the memory (16 vs. 8 GB)
  • Faster video card with 4x the memory (RTX 2070 with 8 GB vs. GTX 770 with 2 GB)
  • A CPU with 2x the number of cores (8 core AMD Ryzen 2700 vs. 4 core Intel Core i5)
  • A larger case (microATX vs. mini-ITX)

The new case is an improvement because I’ve moved the PC back under the desk, so I don’t need a super-small case anymore. A taller one will make the front-facing ports and jacks easier to access, and the case itself should theoretically be easier to work with.

I’ve already gotten the video card, the next step is to figure out where to get everything else. Having amazon.ca ship everything to a locker is appealing (and simple) but amazon’s pricing and selection is surprisingly inconsistent, so I may be going to local dealers, like I did before NCIX self-immolated.

I am both excited (that new toy feeling) and filled with dread (piecing everything together, turning it on, nothing happening). And of course, it doesn’t address one critical aspect–I’m back to using Ulysses, a Mac-only writing app. I’m hoping the developers will eventually use their alleged subscription-fed largesse to port the program to Windows. I don’t think they will because they seem beholden to Apple’s ecosystem, but it would be nice. I like the app a lot more than I like macOS. Maybe I’m just too used to Windows after a hundred years of using it.

But maybe WriteMonkey 3.0 will eventually come out of beta, actually support indents and fulfill all my writing needs. It could happen!

Perhaps most importantly, my giant backlog of games can’t be played on a Mac mini. It’s new PC time.

I want a tiny computer

If I thought I wouldn’t game at all, I’m pretty sure my next PC would be a NUC, simply because they are so small and adorable. And you can get a full PC without any real compromises–you can have fast storage, lots of memory, a good port selection. And it can sit silently and adorably on the desk, where those ports are easy to get to.

I will likely build a new, bigger PC with a full-size video card in the near-future to replace my current, aging machine. But I might go ahead and then build a NUC as a secondary/experimental PC. I might even try a zany Hackintosh build, so I can have that Mac experience, but with a good keyboard.

Informative notes on lab PCs

Found today in a library lab sitting on top of the keyboard:

You're a bad PC, aren't you?The part that tripped me up was when I thought it said “slutty computer” and I was trying to determine how someone would reach that conclusion. Porn wallpaper? Lust moans for every Windows sound effect? DVD tray keeps sliding open? Then I read the note again and understood and was a little disappointed.

 

When PSUs are KIA -or- The Day the (PC) Power Died

I came home from work on Wednesday to find my PC shut off. This may not seem unusual except I keep my PC on 24/7. A quick perusal of clocks and such confirms no power outage. I brace myself for Bad PC News.

I press the power button. Nothing. I press it again. Nothing.

I jiggle the power cord, then swap it out and try another one. Nothing and nothing.

The amount of nothing is pointing toward one thing: the power supply, which has worked faithfully for over three years, has died. The only way to confirm this was to put another one in and I don’t exactly have a bunch of spares kicking around.

It wasn’t until today that I was able (or willing–picking things up after work during rush hour is a certain kind of madness) to get a replacement. I would be turfing my modular 700 watt OCZ for a modular Antec 620 watt. I felt safe getting a lower wattage PSU because I’m running two drives now instead of three, one of which is a low-energy SSD.

I pulled the PC out from under the desk and set it on the table in the living room. Both the underdesk and the inside of the PC case were resplendent with dust. Compressed air in a can was generously blasted all about and the resulting dust bunnies collected with a broom and pan. I extracted the dead PSU and noted how it resembled the head of Medusa, with its twisty cables the snakes. Having not turned to stone by gazing upon it, I set it aside and installed the new Antec power supply, plugged everything back in and hit the power switch, hoping for more than nothing.

It came on without a hitch. Hooray.

Ironically, after spending time working inside the cavernous interior of my MegaCase™ I was left with a desire to go small for my next PC, whenever I might get it. I’d like something that plays games decently but can sit on a desk, run quietly and work more like an appliance. I think this means I’m over my mid-life crisis or something.