hardware war-story

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I have an eMachine T2625.  It has an Athlon 2600+ XP CPU, which should 
give you an idea of its age.

It was acting unreliably.  In particular, it would fail memtest86+
whatever memory I put into it.  But not badly.  So it would mostly
work -- enough to boot and run Linux or WinXP for quite a while.

Solution: new heat-sink grease on the CPU.

I figured this out after much trial and error.  I'll not bother you
with that part of the story.

The BIOS reported the CPU temperature, and it seemed reasonable to me
before applying the grease.  It did drop 5-8 degrees (according to the
BIOS) after greasing.


More (possibly boring) details:

I got the computer from an "Environment Day" a few years ago -- I
rescued it from being recycled.

It hasn't been very reliable for me.  I suspect that the original
owners found it unreliable too -- there are Best Buy stickers on it
that I'm guessing mean they took it in for service.

I changed the power supply early on.  That seemed to improve things.

I never really used it much.  I find it too noisy, among other things.  I 
just keep it as a junker for mucking about with, and I don't get around to 
mucking about much.

I recently did a memtest86+ run to see if it would take faster RAM 
(because that is what I had on hand, and I wanted to know if it would
work in a similar machine that I didn't want to take out of service
for the experiment).  The test failed.  In fact, with all combinations
of memory sticks, including the original, the tests failed.  But not
solidly.  It usually took somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes for a
failure to show up.

The original grease was the kind of fusible strip that comes on HSF
assemblies.  It melts the first time the CPU is turned on.  But if you
remove the HSF, I think you need to replace the goo.

Most folks don't have grease laying about.  Current products are
expensive and come in small doses.  I happened to have a 2oz tube
remaining from building a PIII system a dozen years ago.  It seems to
be good enough even though the newer stuff ought to be better (it
would take 16 of these
<http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=8_128&item_id=021296>
to give you 2oz, costing $128).
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