NationStates Jolt Archive

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/05/11/white_hot_compaq/

Pity reader Rafael Santos, who came home from work, started up his Compaq nc8430 only to find it refusing to start up because the on-board thermal sensor was registering an internal temperature of 5155°C.

To put that into context, the surface of the Sun is, at 5526°C just 371°C hotter than Rafael's laptop. It's not far off the temperature at the centre of the Earth, for that matter.

Thank the bearded bloke in the sky it didn't set off the battery...

Now, we're too generous to put it down to Photoshoppery, but since Rafael's home nation of Brazil didn't disappear in a cloud of superheated steam this week, we have to conclude the Compaq was running cooler than stated.

A glitch in the Fedora Linux distro Rafael's attempting to run? Or a monumentally inaccurate heat sensor? We'll leave it for you to decide...

I thought that was funny as hell. Of course its most likely a component failure or s/w glitch. However 5K degrees is still pretty impressive! LOL

Anyone here seen blatantly wrong feedback from devices like this? I have. *shudder*

I used to be a network support engineer on a banking project. We supported 27 remote sites. One night our server monitoring tool (Tivoli) started reporting fatal error traps. (fatal meaning a dead serivce and trap is a definition of what you want monitoring)

At first there were a couple every few minutes which soon turned into a trickle. Then a stream. Then I got swamped...10,000 fatal errors...from none to that in....15 minutes. I thought the world had ended. By the time the problem was under control we had around 300,000 errors.

I had to call our network guru...who turned up....swore a heartfelt 'fucking hell' and eventually solved the problem at 3am. He promptly crawled under his desk and went to sleep.

Me? I had to clean up the rest of the mess. Which was not much fun. Calling a client IT director (SVP level in the US) to tell them that all their business centres were fux0r3d and would not be up until mid-day at the earliest...not fun...esp at 3am.

The problem? Dodgy router. Some moran had mis-configured a router and it slayed all the NT3.51 servers...

So....your story?

Around Christmas a couple of years ago the CD drive on my desktop decided it didn't like working, so it stopped. I swiftly concluded that my lack of computer knowledge would only make the problem worse, so a few days after christmas I got onto the customer support people. I really have no idea what they(or rather, he) talked me through, but now everytime the desktop turns on it informs us that it can't find the floppy disk drive. Which is to be expected, because the computer never had a floppy disk drive. I just find it odd that it expects to find one.

Around Christmas a couple of years ago the CD drive on my desktop decided it didn't like working, so it stopped. I swiftly concluded that my lack of computer knowledge would only make the problem worse, so a few days after christmas I got onto the customer support people. I really have no idea what they(or rather, he) talked me through, but now everytime the desktop turns on it informs us that it can't find the floppy disk drive. Which is to be expected, because the computer never had a floppy disk drive. I just find it odd that it expects to find one.

Ahh...that sounds like a bios setting...boot device jobbie...

Love it:)

My firewall refuses to update. When I try updating it crashes windows. Ditto when I try uninstalling. :S

Speedfan still tells me one of the temperature sensors in my comp is reading 125 degrees, not as extreme, but scared the hell outta me first time I ran it.

The goverment of Angelitis doesn't allow it's citizens computers. However one of our official goverment PC's has a problem. Our goverment has chosen to use Opera as it's browser, however any time we try to uninstall IE it crashes the PC. So now in order to use Opera we must also have IE.

Eh, this is an OOC forum. :)

The goverment of Angelitis doesn't allow it's citizens computers. However one of our official goverment PC's has a problem. Our goverment has chosen to use Opera as it's browser, however any time we try to uninstall IE it crashes the PC. So now in order to use Opera we must also have IE.

Ever got the dreaded Permanent Shit Resolution problem in w98, via "safety mode"? When you try to use Safety Mode to restore something and the only thing it does is getting you stuck with 640x480x16color XD

I was just watching The Daily Politics when the inevitable happened.

The preponderance of technology in show like this (the laptops and such) really go for a burton in spectacular fashion. In this case it was a laptop. You guessed it...running Windows.

The lady co-presenter along side Andrew 'Brillo Pad' Neil is Jenny 'The Teeth' Scott. She had the unfortunate experience of having her laptop shut down live on TV. Yep - the dulcet tones were broadcast. While Brillo Pad was interviewing some Brownite arselicker.

Jenny admitted that the machine 'just shut itself down' and apologised.

Some 10 minutes or so further into the show....yep...machine turned itself on...once more interrupting another Brillo Pad interview.

Wry smiles and giggles all round.

Now me? If that had happened to me? Oh man....the thought makes me want to eat cheesecake!

Looks like someone learned how to create cold fusion in a laptop and forgot to tell.

Ever got the dreaded Permanent Shit Resolution problem in w98

There's yer problem right there.

I believe that Speedfan and others have been reporting the wrong temperatures to me for some time, which I guess will be due to a fault on the mobo, unless my cpu is actually running at a mean of 60-65'C which would be rather worrying.

I noticed it was running Linux - so Linux is the hottest OS on the planet? :p

There's yer problem right there.
It does it in every version of windows. Want to go to safety mode? 640x480, 16 bit color. Which is just lovely on a 19" LCD monitor with a native resolution of twice that.

Around Christmas a couple of years ago the CD drive on my desktop decided it didn't like working, so it stopped. I swiftly concluded that my lack of computer knowledge would only make the problem worse, so a few days after christmas I got onto the customer support people. I really have no idea what they(or rather, he) talked me through, but now everytime the desktop turns on it informs us that it can't find the floppy disk drive. Which is to be expected, because the computer never had a floppy disk drive. I just find it odd that it expects to find one.

Just disable the floppy drive in the hardware manager. Problem solved.

Motivational posters, Team building, Assertivness training, Fucking management speak, in fact the whole "Human resources" industry,
PUT THEM IN A FIELD< AND BOMB THE BASTARDS!;)

It does it in every version of windows. Want to go to safety mode? 640x480, 16 bit color. Which is just lovely on a 19" LCD monitor with a native resolution of twice that.

Run! Run! Its the invasion of the computer bores!;)

Motivational posters, Team building, Assertivness training, Fucking management speak, in fact the whole "Human resources" industry,
PUT THEM IN A FIELD< AND BOMB THE BASTARDS!;)

You sure you posted in the right thread?

I believe that Speedfan and others have been reporting the wrong temperatures to me for some time, which I guess will be due to a fault on the mobo, unless my cpu is actually running at a mean of 60-65'C which would be rather worrying.

Only mildly worrying. It's usual for CPUs to run at about 45-50 degrees Celsius; above 50 and it's less usual, but still close enough to be considered relatively OK for shortish periods of time.

I want a laptop at 5,000 C...
I could use it to cook marshmallows. And the entirety of Grimsby.

Oh, and my laptop once reported twice as many USB ports as it actually has. Does that count?

It does it in every version of windows. Want to go to safety mode? 640x480, 16 bit color. Which is just lovely on a 19" LCD monitor with a native resolution of twice that.
My monitor doesn't know how to deal with it, so it renders the right eighth and bottom eighth of the screen off the side. Cannot see the fucking start menu, cannot see the clock.


As for my glitch: I bought a Sapphire (they manufacture cards designed by ATI/AMD) graphics card with my PC, and as such it came with a disk that had an overclocking utility as well as some skins for the Catalyst Control Center. The box Sapphire (lovely box too, cardboard brown with only the word Sapphire on it), the cooling unit has a stylized Sapphire graphic on it, and the back of the card has a sticked denoting the make and model (which contains the word Sapphire). So I install the CCC, and it goes fine. I try the extra Sapphire software and am told "This software only supports GPU's manufactured by Sapphire Tech." I looked in the CCC and it also said that it was an ATI manufactured card.

Oh, and my laptop once reported twice as many USB ports as it actually has. Does that count?

Isn't this the laptop equivalent of having an extra toe? Hy-uck!

Isn't this the laptop equivalent of having an extra toe? Hy-uck!

It also reported that none of them were USB 2.0, despite the fact that they were.
It's therefore like an extra toe but with none of the toes having nails on.
Yuck.

I used to think that your hands should be clean before touching a computer lest it gets a virus... and I am not kidding.

Now in my more mature days...
I am currently using a five-year-old Compaq laptop. Okay, this laptop is heavy, me and my friend (we have the same model) think of this laptop as a portable desktop computer. That is forgivable, but...

... it has a measly 27GB of memory and 256 MB RAM
... and here's a list of components that doesn't work
- the keyboard (only the home row keys are still working)
- the mouse pad (the left button is stuck; the pad has gone haywire)
- the CD-RW drive (very noisy, cannot burn CDs anymore, cannot read many CDs, evil evil nasty drive, always overheats and spits out CDs good enough to burn your fingers, and electrocutes me every now and then)
... and that is teetering on the edge
- the hard drive (very noisy, and slow)
- the speaker (crackles)
... and I will stop whining about my laptop lest it realize I am bitchin' about it and won't start up the next time.

So basically, I'm just using the laptop for its processor and monitor. I have a keyboard and a mouse plugged in. Can somebody send in donations so this NSGer can buy a new one? *falls on knees and begs*

There's yer problem right there.
There are some things Win98 can do that newer versions of Windows can't (like run some early DOS software). There are good reasons to keep a Win98 box around.

There are some things Win98 can do that newer versions of Windows can't (like run some early DOS software). There are good reasons to keep a Win98 box around.

Nah, install Virtual PC 2007 and install Windows 98 on that! Don't need a real PC.