As far as i know the PicoPsu does not regulate the 12v line. So if your battery is fully charged and putting out 12.6v your components get that too. Charging could be even more of a problem with the battery connected.

Anyone know the usual tolerances of computer components on the 12 v line?

I have an AMD 64 3200 and ASUS A8V-E SE system in an Antac 3700BQE case which has started behaving strangely recently. I've been leaving it on "suspend" by hitting the power button on the keyboard for the last few months. This seemed to turn off everything but ram and all the system fans go off too....

Cool. I thought so. Good advice, thanks. But the computer's mainly for the use of others who wouldn't appreciate the difference. I've just built a system with quiet stock parts so at least it won't be a screamer. :) Though I haven't powered it up yet. Maybe when I hear it I'll change my mind! Yay, n...

I'm currently assembling my Athlon 64 system. Just got stuck with the instructions. They mention approved thermal paste, but there appears to be a square of something already applied to the stock cooler. And nothing else in the box. Do I need to by seperate heatsink paste? Or is the paste: that grey...

I don't really know. But I wouldn't have thought it was enough to justify a second drive. I read LG DVD drives are a bit quieter than average on a CD review site (thats my planned purchase), but they may not be upto SPCR standards. My 52x LG CDRW has been good, certainly not silent, but quieter than...

Umm..

Won't a DVD burner also be able to burn CDs?

Here's what I did using a Zener diode and a switch:

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=14753

I don't know why more people don't do it. It's a defined/known voltage drop. But if you have a high current fan, finding a suitable Zener may be harder.

P1 should be fine, even lower power. well, depending on the exact machine, of course, but to max out a 10mps connection you need somewhere 200MHz+ Mine's a Pentium 1 150MHz and delivers about 2.4 Meg a second through a generic 10/100 PCI card. Plenty fast enough. :D And it only has 64 Meg ram (used...

Silly me. The old proxy settings were stopping it from connecting.

I discovered this when I copied FAH502-Linux.exe to a new directory to try and start a fresh. And it ask me some config Qs. One of them was about proxies. So I edited the old client.cfg, all fixed.

how embarrassing.

I recently change ISP to a wireless unlimited account, and setup firewalling using firestarter (linux firewall setup software). Firewall is working fine, can browse web no trouble. And I have opened up other ports as I need based on the Events tab where blocked connections are shown. However nothing...

This is strange, anyone got any idea what is wrong? It was working! [01:01:24] + Attempting to send results [01:01:25] - Couldn't send HTTP request to server [01:01:25] (Got status 403) [01:01:25] + Could not connect to Assignment Server [01:01:26] - Couldn't send HTTP request to server [01:01:26] (...

Just made another interesting observation: Some low power electical items make this mystery current appear to decrease when plugged in. It seems to happen for low power switching power supply devices. Eg my AA battery charger. Maybe the switching power supplies are interfering with the AC power, and...

Not sure where to post this: Yesterday I bought a cheap extension lead, and a three terminal in-line fuse block to make a power meter using my Digital Multimeter. After cutting th cable in half, carefully screwing bared ends in the correct places, and solding two 10A wires (in-line with active) from...

It turns out that the buzzing is coming from the AC adaptor for my DSL modem (made by Westell, if that makes a difference). Is it safe for me to swap it with another one? I have a Hayes 33.6 Modem which had a 9V AC power brick that buzzed quite loudly. You could easily hear it from the next room. F...

Anyone know where to get one in Australia? I can't find anyone who sells Seasonic stuff. However I discovered my old Pentium 200MMX which was made to order here, actually has a Seasonic power supply in it. For it's time was quieter than anything else i'd seen, and temperature controlled! Still going...

The Benq x120 is the most comfortable, ergonomic and quiet keyboard I've found. It's only about a half inch thick so your hands don't have to arch up to us it. I also appreciate the fact that it uses the standard IBM AT style key layout which seems to be what you find in most office settings. I can...

That was actually a year and two months ago! I was just updating the final results and linking with how I did it in another thread. I used a zener because in reverse they have the drastic voltage drop you mentioned. Mine was about 4V drop in reverse polarity to get it down to around 8V. Saves puttin...

I saw someone linked to this thread regarding HD temp. :) So I just thought I'd update the final outcome. I did put a Panaflo in the old PSU. This further droped temperatures for the same noise level. So I then soldered in a Zener to run at 8 Volts: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=1...

Regard the PSK-5000:

Does anyone know where I can get one in Austraila, or shiped to Australia? I wrote to greenlaptop.com but they never replied. Google didn't help much.

My quiet little dinosaur has a Forton Source AT PSU that came from a 386. I bought it in 1992. Thats 12 years old now! It's running a Pentium I 150Mhz and a 60Gig barracuda for file/print/internet serving/sharing. Mine has had fairly light use, and until I put in a Panaflo and a Zener had a generic ...

I've heard EL illuminated things tend to whine in general. Just usually the people that buy them can't hear it over the 6+ fans installed in their case.

fraz

I have tried various things over the past year and and I'm finally happy with my PSU's noise, so I thought I'd share it with everyone since I haven't seen it documented before. The story so far: I initially tried using 2x 5W resistors in parallel soldered in line with the stock fan, and a switch to ...

Glad i could help!

Thats how I got know these things!

I don't know if XP has this problem. Since i haven't owned an XP computer, and don't plan to.

But it would be very easy to implement. Just don't flush the buffers when the disk is off!

Mine only wakes up once a day for the cron jobs at around noon. So it sounds like there something still not quite working right. I still think you should just leave hdparm alone and use noflushd. You will get much longer periods without HD spinup. However, as you noted, if you loose power and have u...

You'll want to use ext2 which is the traditional non-journaled linux filesystem, and noflushd which is a daemon to power off hard drives when the has not been a read for X minutes. The best thing about this linux implementation is that unlike MS Windows disk writes are stored in memory until the dis...

I once heard that the big cache drives have a greater chance of data loss if the drive (IE wholecomputer) is switched off before the data makes it from the cache to the drive platter. Is this true? how long does the data in HD cache wait to be written to the physical disk? Nothing like linux bufferi...

There is an increase in noise, but it is mainly seek noises, not the idle noise. I actually don't mind being able to slightly hear the seeks. I still find it kind of unnerving without them. :) The hard drive is still just screwed in, the case is too small for fancy setups. However the PSU fan is sti...

I just removed the second floppy drive and put the Seagate Barracuda in its place, and left the face plate off. I also covered the PCI slot I had removed earlier. And the temperature drop is AMAZING! With an ambient of 22^C I get a HD temperature of 36^C after an uptime of a hour and a half. Thats o...

I think next time i'll put some thought into how much heat the Hard drive generates when i'm buying another. A HD only 13 deg above ambient (like yours Jan) would be nice! Thanks for the suggestion Jan about moving the hard drive to the floppy bay and leaving the cover off. I currently have two flop...