DreamPC 2006 ready for it's grave...

Suggest better components and I will listen, if they are not better than I
will burn you to the ground.

Bye,
Skybuck.

On Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:46:19 +0100, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:

I personally do not care about any facts you may find because my harddisk
has bad sectors plain and simple.

But it was NOT from you closing your ****ing PC case door, IDIOT!

On Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:51:24 +0100, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:

The antec 1200 case door is detached, therefore it requires horizontal and
vertical movement to shut it closed properly.

Bye,
Skybuck.


NOTHING you do short of knocking the PC over, or off of a table top is
going to do ANYTHING to your hard drive. So shut the **** up about
something which you obviously know NOTHING about!

Some more interesting reports and possible conclusions.

Yesterday the DreamPC was on for a long time running Linux Mint 11, suddenly
I started hearing this ticking sound.

Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick.

Apperently it was coming from the DreamPC.

I suspect one of the harddisk heads was hitting the platter repeatedly over
and over and over again.

I decided to turn off the system.

Today I turn on the system and immediatly boot into Linux Mint 11 also
because yesterday Windows did not want to boot because
of boot manager/disk problems/bad sectors ? Which was kinda weird. Linux
Mint 11 yesterday had some trouble starting because of bad sectors
it seems but ultimately managed to boot from dvd.

I was surprised that today Linux Mint 11 booted up just fine and I was also
surprised that the harddisks are working again.

Even Windows 7 came back alive surprisingly which is what I am using now.

I also checked the bad sectors on the Windows 7 System drive which is one of
the new 2 TB hitachi drives.

The drive now has 366 bad sectors, which is reported by Linux Mint 11 as
"some bad sectors".

The number of bad sectors seems to have increased I think... probably caused
by the ticking yesterday.

The ticking is gone today, the ticking yesterday occured very suddenly,
therefore I shall have to come to the following conclusion:

The cause of the ticking could be:

Micro vibrations and resonance.

So my hypothesis is now the following:

The spinning of the harddisk bay fans cause micro vibrations, if these micro
vibrations somehow match the frequency of the material of the harddisk head
then the harddisk head starts to vibrate/resonante, like that famous bridge
which ultimately collapsed because of wind and resonance.

I also tried to cause more damage to the remaining harddisk by bumping my
table a couple of times and rocking it back and forth a little bit, the
monitor rocked a bit back and forth but the PC not... probably too heavy...

I also checked with Linux Mint 11 and the other two harddisks which were
undamaged remain undamaged, so bumping the table does not lead to damage or
bad sectors, at least not immediatly.

I also thought about smacking the horn of the phone on it and maybe that
caused damage when I was angry once, but that seems to be impossible as
well.

Rocking back and forth my table wasn't too smart, the table is a bit shacky
as well, fortunately no damage occured.

I am starting to believe the "micro vibration and resonance" hypothesis and
therefore I have secured my remaining harddisks, by attaching the 24
harddisk bay screws to the drive bays.

I am now also starting to believe that Antec company must have known about
the need for 24 screws, they must have known this is necessary to provide
the harddisk with some more stability.

The advice of somebody else on usenet to leave only a few screws attached or
none at all appears to have been foolish, at least assuming this is cause of
damage, which starts to become more believable.

I also notice the bottom harddisk bay has slightly more vibrations, this can
be explained by two factors:

1. The power fan is on the bottom.

2. The bottom tray contains two harddisks.

The other two middle and top bays are nearly vibrationless now that the
screws have been attached.

So without screws there was some vibration feeling by fingers touching it.

With screws the vibration is nearly gone.

This was felt/measured at low fan speed.

Since filters are gone I keep fans at low fan speed to prevent hairs from
being sucked in, this seems smart setting to use at least for my much lower
heat graphics card.

Perhaps my system could now take much more heatfull graphics cards, but I
dare not risk it and the graphics card would get full with dust anyway and
then overheat motherboard again so I am not going to do that.

I also wonder if perhaps electrical issue might still be cause of some
strange behaviours, but for now it's probably the vibrations and bad sectors
which caused some weird stuff to happen.

I shall now enjoy my computer a bit more... and hopefully soon I will be
able to buy some new harddisks. It's could to try and figure out what cause
of death was to try and prevent it in future otherwise it would be useless
to buy new stuff.

For now I am still a bit skeptical though So I will run my system some
more to see if the ticking returns

I have one more good idea, I shall now place the speakers on the ground
instead of the table, perhaps the gaming I did also contributed to
damage/bad sectors/vibrations.

Perhaps I should test that theory by blasting some sound from speakers, but
I don't feel that test is worth... I might as well place speakers on ground
unless perhaps I can then enjoy music and sound less, but that is something
I am going to try it probably won't matter
that much so the speakers are going on the floor for now... It's a bit dirty
there but so what

Bye,
Skybuck.

Wow, placing the front speakers from the table on the ground has a very
interesting effect, it makes the sound volumes coming from all speakers much
more equal, which makes the surround sound effect much more noticeable.

I guess the wooden table was acting as one gigantic speaker and was somewhat
distorting the surround sound effect ! =D

Now with the new setup it's pretty cool, there also more room on the ground
to spread the front left and front right speaker more apart for more
surround sound effect.

I can now actually hear the side left, side right and rear right and rear
left speakers kicking in ! =D

I also tested call of duty 5 world at war when the speakers where still on
the table and there was indeed some slight vibrations coming from the
"kaboom" power ups... so it's probably better to place the speakers on the
ground anyway.

The less vibrations on the table the better me thinks ! =D

As somebody else would say: "I am now a completely anti-vibration-nazi" !
=D LOL.

or: "Vibrationless nazi" ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck =D

P.S.: Vibrations is best kept for some female devices ! LOL.

I do wonder if I perhaps set the volume of the rear speakers slightly higher
in the receiver, so I'll have to check that sometime to see if that's indeed
the case or not...

It would be nice if I can see that on the digital display of the receiver
otherwise I will have to connect monitor to it again and then requirings
moving the monitor a little bit again which I would rather not do

I shall have to consult receiver manually to see if it's possible to display
speaker volumes on the receiver's display !

Bye,
Skybuck

Oh well, now that the speaker setup is pretty much different I should
probably re-do the audesy auto detection range testing and stuff like
that... pretty cool.

So attaching the monitor is probably best to do all this stuff so me gonna
do that to see what happens and such, me want top surround sound quality !
=D

This also requires attaching the mic again

(I also did re-assignment of speaker, apperently left speaker was subwoofer
again which is a bit strange, maybe linux has something to do with that or
so)

Bye,
Skybuck.

On Tue, 1 Nov 2011 02:57:47 +0100, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:

I suspect one of the harddisk heads was hitting the platter repeatedly over
and over and over again.

You're an idiot.

On Tue, 1 Nov 2011 02:57:47 +0100, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:

The cause of the ticking could be:

Micro vibrations and resonance.

So my hypothesis is now the following:

The spinning of the harddisk bay fans cause micro vibrations,

You're an idiot.

Wow, I just cut my ring ringer finger on my right hand pretty deeply trying
to find a cable in a box, there was also a motherboard i/o bracket in there
which has razor sharp edges.

You electronics people are pretty crazy creating such sharp edges, I could
have cut my entire rist/hand open if I grabbed more deeply.

I am going to put that bracket away in a close somewhere or maybe I should
even dispose of it it's fricking dangerous.

But for now it goes into a close where it will hopefully not cut me in the
future anymore.

My finger is bleeding pretty badly, I hope a bandage will be enough to stop
the bleeding otherwise I might actually need surgery for the first time in
my life...

I am gonna make new bandage and put it a bit more tight... gjez, first
bandage already badly blooded...

Bye,
Skyblood.