I’ve been get more and more annoyed with the fact that the Mac G5’s been freezing almost randomly the last month or so, I’d repaired and rebuilt the disk, changed set up of hardware, just about everything I could think of. The symptoms were that the UI of OSX would freeze, this could be at anytime, the system clock (it’s always good to have the seconds in the system clock area to check if the machines running correctly) would freeze, but the mouse would continue to move unhindered on the screen. The only solution was a reboot, and recheck of the disk, and given it could then happen immediately again, it was getting a bit tiresome.
I’d even looked at replacing the G5 with an iMac, and selling this one off as spares or ‘need repair’ on ebay, but a thought struck me the other night.. This is all graphics related, maybe the graphic card was on its way out. I opened up the case and pulled out the ATI Radeon 9800, and to my horror looked at the fan. This thing was caked in dust, it’s surprising that the thing even turned to be honest!! a little run over with the handheld Dyson (compressed air would have been more sensible but I thought that given the amount of dust lodged in the fan, I might as well go for the industrial cleaning!) resulted in a nice clean and clear fan. I put the card back into the G5, booted and kept my fingers crossed.. I seems that this was the entire issue. Obviously the fan was not providing enough cooling to the chip, and it was shutting down as it reached critical temperature, since I’ve had no freezes since.. so if in doubt and your mac is freezing.. give the innards a good hoover!!
Andy Piper also let me know the commenting on the blog was broken (thanks for that, and the congrats on the engagement!) It seems that I missed something in my auto changing comments scripts, something that I have to do to battle the constant spam I get here; basically every few days the comments.cgi script changes to something random and the site should rebuild to take advantage of the new script. Somehow it wasn’t rebuilding all the pages correctly, and hence it was giving and error when people wanted to comment; This is now fixed.. and if your not leaving spam.. comment away.. I also do need to redesign the entire blog, so I’ll need to code in that fix when I update the backend installation of MovableType.
Since I was now on a fixing and tidying mission, I attacked the office at home.. The office really is the place I spend most of my day, its my home office for IBM, and also it’s where lot of my less valuable magic books sit, my G5 Mac, my Thinkpad (obviously!) and all my technical books, and its where Ash and Willow spend most of the day when I’m at home, and to be honest.. it’s a mess..
It’s looking a lot more tidier now, and I think if I keep tidying during my lunch breaks and evenings, it might be inhabitable by the end of the week again!!!
Entries (RSS)
Entries (RSS)