It Finally Happened... Dead CPU

It's happened, happened in annoyingly mundane circumstances, but happened nonetheless... I've killed a CPU.

The first CPU I've ever ever killed, and I've toyed with and worked with CPU's since about 1994, juggling them and building systems, basically as soon as I was introduced to modular PC's at college I was playing about with them fitting parts and drives and replacing things in the great beige boxes.

So what was I doing to finally kill a CPU?

Well, before I explain, let us just lament the chip, it was my Core 2 Quad Q6600, a chip I paid release week prices for, which served me throughout my time playing Eve-Online and World of Warcraft, the chip on which so many gaming marathons in Day of Defeat was carried out and the first chip I really played about with understanding the out of order execution of the new Pentium architecture Intel had foisted upon us (and which I'd tried to ignore for many moons).

Late July 2006 it arrived, I installed a then whopping 1GB of RAM into it and Windows 98 was stuck on it until November when it received Windows Vista, and it worked a charm, equipped with a further 3GB of RAM to a total of 4GB.  Two GTX 8800 graphics cards in SLi it was a beast in it's day.

It led a long and fruitful life in gaming and productivity for me, and so last night 2nd May 2020, a full fourteen years of service later it has gone to silicon heaven.

How did it die?  Right, well, I've been setting up a CCTV system, the neighbours continue to be a source of perturbation for us.  So I had the Q6600 set up in a case with 4GB of RAM streaming to YouTube, however it ran so hot, like a really really hot.  So the plan was to take it out that cramped case, put it into a Bitfenix case with a large 775 cooler.

I get it on the bench, test boot, all fine, remove the ssd and stow it and get to work, all the power out and off, all the cables out the way, unscrew and lift the mobo out, I get my test bench PSU and test boot to the BIOS, all fine.  But I can hear a loud noise, like a whine... I figure it's the power supply, so swap to another power supply, and still hear the same noise... Ohhhhh... what the heck is that?

I reduce to the minimum RAM, and boot... Nothing, what happens is the fan spins a moment then off.... Spins, then off... Spins then off... Oh oh...

I changed the RAM, so change it back... same thing. spin, stop, spin stop... No post.

This whine is getting louder each time I turn on....

I have no idea what it is, I'm suspecting a capacitor or coin whine, I'm suspecting the power supply, not the board.

So, I remove the cooler, and swap a different socket 775 chip into the socket, boots to bios fine, no problem.... Oh oh.... I'm suspecting the CPU is bad.

A visual inspection, it looks fine... I trust the Q6600....

I put it back in, power on again and the whine reappears but instantly goes away, and I smell burning.

Power all off, pull the chip... and sure enough one of the underside surface mount components has gone, I can see its blistered and bubbled up... That CPU is dead, at least to me.

I have no idea what's cause this, I suspect it was age combined with being in this constrictive case and getting so very very hot.

I've decided to retire all my core 2 based machines, I have (well had) three... The Q6600, a X5472 and the wall mounted PC.... The wall mounted project is a little difficult to directly change, I may continue as it is, but the rest of them are to go, they're running too hot and too inefficiently, a now old sandybridge chip will be far more energy and performance efficient.

Server Crash... And Corrupt

Yeah, something very bad has happened with one of my boxes... It was not responsive over the network this morning, I thought little of it, power cycled it and came back to it this afternoon.

Anyway, it was still not playing ball, I rolled the vmlinuz image back to 4.4 from 4.15 (the last unattended update I did last week) but everything.  I mean everything, every command, every program (except cat and ls) resulted in a "segmentation fault".

Booting into recovery I got a little further, but the syslog looks very worrisome...

And I could only see this image when I had hauled the machine back into the office and plugged a VGA cable into it, over the network and even over the serial TTY it just sat there spinning it's wheels.

I would like some of the data back off this box, it contains the current (more recent) live image of my WOW server and it contains the old archived version of my Ark server.

Other than that there is a ZFS area which I've dumped home photo's onto, but getting that back is easy, I just pull one of the drives out and remount the ZFS elsewhere... I think though I may buy a new main disk for this machine, I like it.

Tech Rant - Twitch.tv Fix Your Filter

You already know I stream a lot to Twitch.tv, despite making zero income or anything and have pretty much no viewers, it lets me at least think I'm involved in something - seriously guys, I get like 100 views a day on here, go check out my twitch, and my YouTube!  They're linked on the right by the tips jar - which you could also use.. *cough* cheap bastards.

Anyway, what's my problem today?... Well, I've had ANOTHER copyright strike on Twitch, this is the second, the first time was a false positive, it detected god knows what from a truly free royalty free music source.  As a consequence I stopped steaming with music, despite nearly everyone else being able to do so, I didn't want to take the chance.

Today's strike though beggars belief.  It reckons I'm playing Shaggy's rendition of "Mr Bombastic"... I am not doing any such thing, this is a video of me talking... and Tinkering with a server...

Do I look like Mr Bombastic?  Am I totally Fantastic?

I am getting so annoyed with this, because when you submit your appeal, it does not go to twitch, or a forum, it goes off to some mindless entity and you get this horrible worrisome message about their submitting your details to some court in California.

News flash twitch, you'll have to drag me kicking and screaming to get me to go to California, and also the sound doesn't contain any music, and I certainly don't sing!

Idiots....

I broke Amazon

I broke Amazon... I've had an item on order since Monday, and at the time of ordering it was listed as in stock and I even paid for expedited delivery...

When on Tuesday it'd not been dispatched I really wondered why, so asked, but had no immediate reply, four hours later I started to chat with them and not only did I get my expedited payment refunded, but they insisted the item would be sent for delivery 1st class.

Unfortunately, since then I've seen the item appear as "Out of Stock", as "12 items in stock", as "Back in stock Friday", and as "In Stock"... So I've not been confident it'll be delivered.

Today, it's still not listed as dispatched, but it is still listed as "In Stock", however the price has risen £20... From Monday to Wednesday, £20...?

This is sold and dispatched by Amazon... I dunno, maybe my query cost them to answer, so they upped the price.

Either way now, if I get it before the weekend I'll be ecstatic, but just to get it for the original price I'll be happy...

Hotmail Continues To Grate

The new Outlook mail, replacing Hotmail, which I've mentioned before on this very blog, continues to be an absolute pain in the arse...

It was working about two hours ago, now look at it...

Just look...

What use is this?

The fonts are screwed  up, icons missing, the panels overlap and you can't see what's going on... I'm seriously tired of how bad this Outlook system is.

Oh, and before someone says "Oh you're not using IE, that's the problem"... This is how it looks from IE... Even worse...

Dangerous Dogs

I have to say this ladies experience is similar to the problems I dealt with last year, having to tackle staffies attacking a neighbours dog and also the persistent straying of a dog from a rented property on our street.

The police in our area were totally in effective in the second case, but in the first the woman bitten in the scuffle with the dogs refused to press charges, they let that dog get away with attacking theirs unprovoked, now you can see the struggle these people had with that large dog in that report.

I was riding the back of such a dog, and at the time I'd punched, pulled and tried to control that animal, and I have a black belt in karate, my punches get attention.

My only options were to stick a screw driver into the things brain, or throttle it... I was reduced to strangling the thing to death.

As the owner of four dogs, one an older lab, and three young, small, dogs... if any of them were now attacked I'd simply have to kill the attacking dog, because these pitbulls and staffies are trophy dogs they're not under control, many times - like that one reported - they have no lead, no collar, or collars which can be slipped, and never any muzzle.  Because people, mostly - but not exclusively - young men are using them as weapons.

Because if two dogs are fighting and you intervene, and the dogs bite you, the law says its your fault, its not a dog attack, it was animal on animal... But that is such a shaded area, for a large dog attacking my little dog, my little dog is 3 kilos... a large dog would kill him... I'd have to kill that dog.  And I'm afraid to say what else I'd do to its owner with the grief.

But, I should not have to have that worry, people should self control their dogs, they should not be a burden on me for their life choices.  And if their life choice is stupid, like having these huge uncontrollable dogs, then the law and society should protect me, not reinforce their right to stupidity... The laws current stance smacks of being too softly softly touchy feely, and it leaves me for one feeling very exposed.

Outlook Web Mail

Here's my review of outlook web mail - which I've oft moaned I've been forced into using - from a working e-mail system to this piece of shit.... And that's my review...

ITS A PIECE OF SHIT

And just so you can see just a few of my problems with it, a picture speaks a 1000 words.

And yes, I've tried it on all the major browsers, I try to use it from different locations (i.e. different internet connections) and from different Operating Systems.  It just does not function sufficiently, and I'm fast becoming forced to have to resign myself from using it - after over 15 years using that e-mail address - which is a major MAJOR ball ache.

Office PC Broken

Okay, I've been reduced to working on a very old machine, my main development machine - a Core i7 with 8GB of RAM and dual displays has networking and USB issues and since I'm working on a USB and network orientated project I'm unable to work upon it.

Asking IT for a replacement/support/fix is about as helpful as punching myself in the gut, they have no spare machines, they have no support they can take my machine off of me and send it back to the vendor for repair - taking weeks... And when I point out I'm on a deadline for a project important to the company they just shrug, shit they do not give.

Hence yesterday I had a ferret around in the spares pile and put together an old single core Celeron with 2GB of DDR2 ram and a small Sata hard drive... I had to resurrect this with XP - as we have no licenses for windows 7 in 32bit - and then I had to get Visual Studio and all the other tools set up...

The up shot is a glacial pace to my work, I'm sitting waiting for compiles and I'm writing out what I need do next before the system is back up.  Its actually so horribly slow I may - today while alone in the office - swap my broken unit for one from another sucker who's not about and explain myself on Monday, because this project is critical and yet the response to helping me get on with it has been a near consistant shrug.

Only two people have helped keep this project moving, and they work dozens of feet away, and I can't thank them enough, but those closer to and in positions which should furnish me with the tools to get things done... ner... they can't be arsed, they're busy, they're more important than doing projects which might make the company a profit.

---

The problem with the machine on the networking side seems to be a similar problem which a minority of users of this particular networking chip experience, the Intel-82579LM chip on the card seems to have issues.

Ironically I'm so locked out of this machine by IT that I can't even update the drivers to a more recent version, and they've taken a look before and come up with naught, whilst I hit google the once and found others having the issue.

So, sorry for mentioning this and maybe bringing people in here from searches thinking I have a solution, because I don't... sorry.