PC upgrade part two – completely silent PC

Uncategorized, hardware 3 Responses »
Nov 292007

I posted a few months ago about the new case I’d treated my PC to. since then I’ve replaced almost everything inside the case. I got the parts from PlayTech here in Auckland. They had really good prices for the parts I wanted and are very close to work, so I could see what I was buying. I usually buy from Ascent, but they didn’t have everything I wanted.

I got:

  • ASUS P5B Vista Edition motherboard
  • 2Gb G.Skill DDR2 memory
  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor
  • ASUS 8600GTS graphics card
  • Hauppage HVR1300 TV Card
  • Samsung 226BW 22″ widescreen display

    • In fact the only things on my PC that have not been replaced recently are the disk drives – which are about a year old.

    I’ve installed Vista Ultimate and got everything going, but I have noticed a few things:

    The Vista Edition of the motherboard has a SideShow-like extra screen. In theory this is good idea. It could show you whether you have any emails, or the weather or other gadget-like things. In practice it’s hopeless. ASUS did not implement Sideshow, but used their own mechanism. It’s not compatible with the MS gadgets and ASUS have supplied about 6 of their own applets. It gets worse though. You have to log in as Administrator to even get these to work and I’m not about to keep running my PC as administrator. So that has gone into my spare hardware box until such a time as ASUS get the act together.

    The Hauppage card comes with a remote, but that’s not compatible with anything except Hauppage’s own applications. I installed them and had so much grief with them I uninstalled them again. I am now using Windows Media Centre and that works fine, but no remote – that’s also now in my spare harware box.

    The motherboard does come with a remote that is worthwhile, I can shut down the PC without having to bend down to press the stop button. This is really a gimmick though since my PC sits under my desk and is easy to get at. I think with hindsight, I would have steered clear of the Vista Edition motherboard.

    However there is one big plus with the new set-up. The whole rig can be overclocked, that would be fine if I was into gaming or wanted extreme performance. I don’t need that; I run it on its economy setting with Q-Fan enabled and my PC is completely silent. I mean completely; not even the slightest hum. If I need to I can put it on max power (even using the remote), but at its lowest setting it’s still fast enough for me. Mostly the PC is a server, it’s got IIS and Apache, is running 3 Rails web-sites, 3 Apache ones and 3 IIS ones. It’s also running Cruise Control to do continuous builds of my software. It’s a file server for all my data too and I can watch TV and do bits of development on it.

    Posted by Derek at 7:21 am

    Vista PC won’t go to sleep

    Microsoft Vista, hardware 21 Responses »
    Jun 242007

    This problem first happened with RC1 of Vista. I’d press the sleep button (or select Sleep from the Start menu). My PC would go through all its shutdown things, blank the screen and immediately wake up. After a short while the login screen would be displayed, I’d type my password and be back where I started.

    I read on the www.tabletquestions.com forum of other people who’d had similar problems and some had referred to a POWERCFG utility. This turned out to the problem on my PC.

    I ran this utility (in a Command window, as administrator) with the “–DEVICEQUERY wake-armed” parameters and got a list of hardware devices that would wake the PC up. This showed:

    C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
    Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
    Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical

    So if there was activity on my mouse or keyboard, the system would wake up from sleep. It seems that when going to sleep, there’s enough activity from the mouse to wake the system up. Also I didn’t really want the PC to wake up just because I’d moved the mouse out of the way on my desk. So I disabled the mouse as a wake-up device:

    C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicedisablewake “Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical”

    Now the devicequery request does not show the mouse:

    C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
    Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard

    It could be argued I don’t want the keyboard to wake the PC up either, but my motherboard does support wake from sleep on the keyboard so I might give that a go in the future – at the moment it’s disabled in the BIOS.

    Anyway my PC now goes to sleep.

    Why write about this now, since the problem happened with RC1 and did not resurface when I installed a full version of Vista. Until yesterday when I replaced the power supply and case. It’s possible that changing the PSU caused Vista to lose its power settings.

    Posted by Derek at 1:02 pm

    New computer case and power supply

    Antec, Seasonic, hardware 1 Response »
    Jun 242007

    I’ve just got a new case and power supply. The old case was a clunky old beige thing I’d had for over ten years and while the old power supply was good (a Thermaltake butterfly), the whole lot sounded like a jet engine starting up. In our office it was just too loud.

    I’ve bought an Antec Solo Quiet case from Computer Lounge here in Auckland (Antec Solo Quiet case). The guys at the shop advised I get a Seasonic power supply (Seasonic ST12 550 power supply) – I had originally thought of getting a Cooler Master PSU (Cooler Master Real Power 450 power supply).

    It took me an afternoon to rip the old PC apart and put it back together in the new case and there are lots of reviews of the case on the net that explain how to do this. It’s an easy task and you just have to be methodical. The case comes with installation instructions, and I just followed them so I would sure I’d connected everything correctly. It all worked nearly first time – I hadn’t pushed two of the connectors in far enough. One of these is an SATA cable in one of my hard disks. I’ve had this problem before, the cables push into place, but have no latch mechanism to keep them there and they slip off quite easily.

    Is the machine any quieter? I want to say it’s completely silent, but no there’s still a background hum. It’s the power supply (since I disconnected the case and CPU fans and the hum’s still there). It’s quieter than the Thermaltake was, but I’m a bit disappointed, because I wanted complete silence. Maybe it’s as quiet as you can get though.

    The case is excellent though. It looks better than the old beige thing and it is quiet, I don’t get any hard disk noise and the case fan itself is dead quiet.

    However when I ran Vista and put the machine to sleep, an old problem came back – the machine will not sleep. I’ve fixed this in the past and written on www.tabletquestions.com about it. It took me a while to find the solution on that forum so I will post it here

    Posted by Derek at 12:02 pm
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