Retention Brackets are go

A few days ago I got my retention brackets "fitted," where fitted meant simply unscrewing the Xeon brackets and screwing down the early P4 brackets. The early P4 heatsinks fit the motherboard and CPU with these new brackets like a charm. On another note my two CPUs are incompatible. One of the auctions listed the item as the same model number as my first CPU when it was really quite different. As most of you probably know matching CPUs is extremely important and generally a requisite for SMP. I e-mailed the guy and hopefully I'll get this worked out soon. All of my other components seem to work like a charm. I may have to replace my PSU as it seems it won't have enough power on the +12V rail to support all of my components in the completed system. Oh well, I was gonna build a power supply for the final system anyway.

Incognito vcores

Well, I got my testbed assembled and it works perfectly, except when it has two processors installed. After a bit of searching online and some messy thermal adhesive cleanup its come to my attention that the vcore stepping and revision must be the same for each CPU. According to what I've read, this vcore stepping and revision are indicated by the last two letters of the processor's model number. In my case I have an AL vcore and and AH vcore. Unfortunately, these don't match :) I've gotta check to see whether MSI offers a BIOS update to support mixed vcores and if not I'm gonna have to trade one for one with a matching vcore. Hopefully I'll have it up and running soon.

Manuals Pay

Well, I'm glad I read the mobo's manual. Apparently the second power connector is really for the AGP Pro (and 8x) slot and only has exactly the same socket as the 3.3V processor connector, LOL. That was nice relief as I don't really plan on using AGP Pro anytime as of yet. Hopefully I'll get the testbed finished this weekend and I can head over to BestBuy and grab my 12,000BTU Windows air conditioner. Things are going well so far.

Only One - WTF

Well, today I got half way through my barebones test bed assembly when I ran into a little snag... My motherboard requires two 3.3V lines, one for each processor. My brand new Antec 430 only has one 3.3V line for a uniprocessor system. Hopefully with such a high wattage supply I'll be able to patch into the original 3.3V line with another for the second processor. For now I'll just have to test each processor at a time.

Retail???

Yesterday I received my 430W Antec TruePower PSU (Newegg) and two 512MB ECC DDR333 Crucial DIMMs via USPS and UPS respectively. I've already got a rack mount test case so I should be able to through the barebones system together any time now and check for DOA. These items were a little different from the rest being retail items rather than used/OEM. It surprised my when eBay turned up very few Antec 400W+ power supplies and 512MB ECC DDR333 DIMMs. Oh well, they were still pretty cheap retail plus Crucial guarantees the RAM for life, a component that is very succeptable to ESD.

20 out of 20

Today I received my 20 early model Pentium 4 heatsinks via USPS. Sure enough in the box there we 20 P4 heatsinks with mounting hardware and thermal paste (which I'll be replacing with Arctic Silver 5). Hopefully today I'll get the CPUs and retention brackets installed and the heatsinks clipped in. Unfortunately none of my three power supplies laying around have the newer 3.3V processor power connector so I'll have to purchase a cheap power supply to test the components. I'm not gonna buy an expensive 500W PSU because I ultimately plan on building my own DC-DC power supply for each of the five systems, this way I can greatly reduce power consumption and heat.

Fixing Thunderbird Uninstall Problems

After upgrading to Thunderbird 0.8 I tried to uninstall 0.7.3 and ran into a strange glitch, on trying to uninstall I got the following message:

0:Uninstall log folder not found
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Netscape\Netscape\7.1b1
(en)\Uninstall\Uninstall Log Folder
OK

People using 0.7.1 have also reported this error when trying to uninstall, so it wouldn't surprise me if 0.7.2 has the same problem. After searching the Internet a little I found the following solution:

IF you are brave, here's where to modify the registry to get rid of "ghost" entries in the Add/Remove Programs list.

Please note, modifying the registry incorrectly can corrupt windows beyond recovery. Change ONLY the entries in the location below:

To access the registry, go to Start>Run, and type in REGEDIT and press enter.

When the registry editor opens, there should be several folders on the left side of the screen.

Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder.
Expand the SOFTWARE folder.
Expand the MICROSOFT folder.
Expand the WINDOWS folder.
Expand the CURRENT VERSION folder.
Expand the UNINSTALL folder.

In the UNINSTALL folder, all the programs on the Add/Remove programs list should be showing. Scroll down to the [Thunderbird-0.7.x] folder. Right click on the folder, and then click DELETE. That will remove the program from the list.

Thanks go to WstrnElect for discovering this fix. After you do this then just delete the Thunderbird folder from your Program Files directory. This should leave you with a fairly clean uninstall. For the original thread with the fix (for Netscape) check here: http://www.ufaq.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=2575

Second Arrival

Along with my copy of Windows XP64 today I also received my retention brackets, Arctic Silver 5, and my second Opteron 244 via USPS. After test fitting the retention brackets they appear to be a perfect fit and leave much more clearance for the video card than the stock custom brackets would have. Now I just have to wait for my 20 heatsinks to arrive, BTW, the offer still stands. Along with my brackets I also received my two tubes or Arctic Silver which judging from the packaging appear to be authentic. Best of all my second Opteron came today, again in awesome antistatic packaging. Now I'm gonna start thinking about buying some memory...

Windows XP 32x2

My 360 day triall version of Windows XP64 arrived today via DHL much faster than I had expected. In fact I grabbed the mail, sat down at my computer, noticed I had an MS shipment notification, read it, and then noticed that the shipment was sitting beside me. It came in a fairly plane paper folder sort of like Windows XP and with a CD Key that I beleive to be common to all WinXP64 discs. I'll have this installed as soon as I get my hard drives :) If you have a 64bit processor you can get your own 360 trial CD or download and burn the ISO (you're kidding right? Nope.) at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/upgrade.mspx You can also check out the XP64 newsgroup via the instructions on that page. Thumbs up goes to Microsoft for including the community in this by allowing us to grab a reasonable trial, post our problems/requests, and providing instant download ISOs. IMO with this and your recent focus on security you're recovering ;)

One of Two

My AMD Opteron 244 in all of its three layers of paddin arrived via UPS yesterday, I'll be able to test it tomorrow when my heatsinks and retention brackets arrive. You can check out the eBay auction here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6711872605&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT

Open Up That Wallet

About a week ago I received my MSI K8T Master2-FAR and it appears to be extremely high quality. Unfortunately it has non-stand heatsink retention brackets so I knew I'd have to replace those. You can read a post of this and some board's other minor nuisances here: http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10443&page=1 Luckily I was able to find both two 423 retention brackets and 20 P4 heatsinks, yes that's 20. If you're interested in buying one you can contact me here: mrobinson@fuzzymuzzle.com Oh, and I also grabbed a couple of tubes Arctic Silver 5 from one of the auctions while I was at it. You can check out the eBay auctions here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6711628226&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6712888968&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6711858573&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT

My retention brackets and heatsinks should be arriving tomorrow so I should be able to test all of my components for DOA tomorrow.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, sort of like Fedora Core serves as a staging area for Red Hat, this blog will serve as a staging area for my website at http://www.fuzzymuzzle.com I'm hoping to use this page to keep an accurate history of my projects before I get around to turning them into articles. One major project that will be posted here is my five system highly modded computer whose parts are slowly arriving (actually fairly fast due to normal postal standards, props to UPS, USPS, and DHL).