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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 08:44pm on 13/09/2007 under , ,
The other day, I fettled my Windoze 98 box such that I could play Starcraft on it again. That was good. Today, Starcraft abruptly exited a couple of times. looking at the BIOS health check screens showed that the CPU was at the warning temperature (80C), and that the "system fan" was reporting 0 rpm. The "System temp", however, was at a more sensible 32C.

I opened the case; the side was warm to the touch. The inside was hot - the 3 hdds were slightly painful to touch, and the PSU felt warm. All the fans (one on PSU, one on CPU, one bottom-front of case) were working, except the fan on the mboard (Northbridge, I think), which I've replaced once before, and was stopped. I can probably go to a Maplins and get another fan, and botch the connector again, but that doesn't seem likely to do much about the other bits getting hot.

Beyond vacuuming the dust out of the CPU heatsink, what can/should I do to keep this machine running cooler? I've got the side off it at the moment, and the CPU seems to be running at 63C or so (it's just sat in BIOS, though not doing anything much). It's just a Starcraft machine, and fairly elderly, so I don't want to spend lots of money, but I would like it working again!
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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 08:51pm on 10/09/2007 under , ,
We got back from a lovely holiday yesterday; more of that anon.

Today, the boiler was due its "annual"[1] safety inspection. It went roughly thus cut for images )A couple more photos of the condemned boiler can be found in the gallery.
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PSA

posted by [personal profile] emperor at 08:54pm on 09/06/2006 under ,
There is currently a fault with our 'phone line. This means the ADSL at home isn't working. BT say they'll fix it "by Wednesday", which means I'm going to be effectively offline all weekend, and then only in working hours until it's fixed.

The telephone is almost-usable, or use my borg (I'll check it for messages more often).
Mood:: 'pissed off' pissed off
location: Phoenix User Area
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So, following on from the last entry on the subject, Russells emailed [livejournal.com profile] atreic with more details of the appliance insurance. [livejournal.com profile] atreic 'phoned them up, and they said they'd send someone round today between 8 and 6. She pointed out this was utterly unreasonable, as we both have jobs and can't just sit at home all day, so it was agreed that the engineer would call [livejournal.com profile] atreic's mobile an hour before he was going to turn up.

At about eleven this morning, the phone went at home. It was the landlord's mother(!), who was confused as to why the engineer has just phoned her up. I explained what was going on, and told her to tell them to call [livejournal.com profile] atreic's mobile, as we'd told them once already. I gave her [livejournal.com profile] atreic's mobile number for this purpose. Shortly afterwards, the landlord's mother phone's [livejournal.com profile] atreic to tell her all of this. [livejournal.com profile] atreic then phones him and gives him her number (which he has already, suprise, suprise). Mid-afternoon, she's not heard anything, so calls him, but fails to get any useful reception, and then is cut off, only to get answerphone thereafter. [livejournal.com profile] atreic then calls the call center to be told that the engineer has recorded a "I called, but they were out", and that they can't send us anyone again until the 20th, well over a fortnight after the dratted thing failed in the first place. To cap it all, our "Property Manager" at Russells is on holiday until Monday.

I am furious. I am utterly sick and tired of being fucked around by these useless muppets. Tommorow morning, Russells are going to get an exceedingly stroppy email from me demanding Something Be Done. It's not my fault if they didn't know about the stupid appliance insurers, it's not my fault if said insurers can't pass on instructions to their engineers, and I'm sick of not having a working washing machine. I'm meant to be renting a furnished property, for crying out loud!

[Edited in light of [livejournal.com profile] atreic's comment
Mood:: 'angry' angry
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You may recall that when I got back from Daniel's wedding, we discovered that our washer-drier was broken. [livejournal.com profile] atreic phoned Russells, who sent someone round, who frobbed it a bit, and decided that the central control unit was buggered. That's probably going to cost as much as the ancient machine is worth, so he said he'd phone Russells.

[livejournal.com profile] atreic chased Russells up at the end of last week, to be told they'd tried to get hold of the landlady and failed, but had got hold of her mother(!) who said she'd try to get hold of the landlord.

Today [livejournal.com profile] atreic chased them again, to be told that the landlord apparantly has an appliance repair contract (which they knew nothing about, despite managing the property for the past 3 years), and is annoyed that Russells had sent someone to look at the machine. They gave [livejournal.com profile] atreic the details of this policy, and suggested she call them to arrange for someone to come round and do something useful. So, [livejournal.com profile] atreiccalls them. They ask her a series of questions she couldn't answer "how old is the machine?", "When does the policy expire?"[1], and so on, and then say they can't help without answers to these.

So, [livejournal.com profile] atreicthen has to call Russells back and explain this mess. They've now got to shout at the landlord to give them enough information so they can actually get the appliance people to send someone out to look at the machine, at which point we'll have reached stage 1 of the process, again. Over a week after the fucking thing broke.

Inserting a random fourth party into the already-over-beurocratic process of house-renting is just fucking crap, especially if you don't tell anyone you're doing it! And these people will presumably want to waste lots of time, in order to try and avoid paying out.

[livejournal.com profile] atreic has been a star at hassling people about all this, when she really has better things to do with her life.

Err, so if you live near us, we may come and ask nicely to borrow your washing machine :(

[1]err, WTF? surely they should know this? muppets!
Mood:: 'stressed' stressed
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posted by [personal profile] emperor at 05:31pm on 04/05/2005 under ,
This post was going to begin something like "Have you ever had one of those days when lots of little things go wrong, and you keep making stupid mistakes, or forgetting things? Where nothing is the end of the world, but the sum of all the little things is a pretty bad day? I've had one of those".

Then, just as I was getting home (to pick up the bike light I'd forgotten this morning), my bike broke. As in, the frame sheared through. Picture here. So now I'm faced with a fairly pricey frame repair and repaint (it's a good enough frame that that's worth doing), and need to find a spare bike in a hurry, since our "spare" isn't really up to being used for several weeks. So, that made things all rather worse :(
Mood:: 'distressed' distressed

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