I have been suspending hard disk for just about as long as this website exists. I have always suspended my hard disk with a rubber elastic band just as many of you have done here. About 6 months ago, I bought a 150gb WD Raptor. It is a great disk but I have just RMA'ed it the second time. I have als...

I have a pretty low end system. My specs are 1. Athlon 64 X@ 5000 2. Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H with onboard VGA 3. 2 GB RAM 4. One Harddisk 5. One optical drive I am basically looking for a near silent PSU with 300W. I have been using the Silenx 300W that is about 5-6 years old now. I am getting random ...

I have had the Shuttle Zen for a few years and it is coming of age. I checked Shuttle's lineup recently and it looks to me, they have gone upscale and cover mostly the gaming market. I use the Zen exclusively for movies. It sits inside an entertainment center right next to a Yamaha receiver connecte...

Look for Burst/Bulging Capacitors on your motherboard. Andy It's funny that you mention that. This is a replacement board for one with bad caps. The caps do look prestine, the board is only been in use for about a month now and for the first couple of week, it did not exhibit any boot problems. I w...

Lately my machine started to freeze on bootup. When I say freeze, I mean it simply stops, no BSOD or crash. This only happens during the first five minutes after the machine has been shut down for a few hours or only during "cold" boots. Once I reboot a few times, it runs 100% solid. So it seems to ...

I thought I post a follow up to my original post. After the bios multiplier started to act strange, the next thing I knew my onboard USB suddenly died on me. The internal RAID controller had long given up being reliable. The board has been otherwise rock-solid, however, dispite the fact that it ran ...

mattthemuppet wrote:can you set it to the correct setting in the Bios? ...

Yes, I can. The board does not recognize the CPU. It comes up as Unknown CPU type. When I go into the bios, I force the CPU mulitplier to 9.5x which three weeks ago gave me a clock of 1800, today's its 1500.

I have an old ABIT KT7-RAID board. I am using it with an Athlon Thoroughbred B. The board is not actually supported for this processor but it works just fine none the less (for more than 18 months) and runs much cooler than the original Thunderbird 1300 I had in there. Here is a thread that talks mo...

I promised a followup, here it is: I decided on two Hitachi Sata 80GBs and a generic Silicon Image 3112 raid controller. Total cost plus shipping $169. For the life of me, I could not get the controller to work properly. Drives were recognized but I could not format them. The format process aborted ...

The people at storagereview keep saying the same thing that RAID0 does not improve desktop performance. I have never done any testing with my RAID0 setup except once. I normally back up via Norton Ghost and moved the RAID image to a standalone 20GB Seagate. Boot time increased significantly as in +2...

I am looking to upgrade my disks. My current setup is an Abit KT7-RAID board with an Athlon XP 2400. While the XP is not supported by Abit, it works like a charm. The performance (coming from a Thunderbird @ 1000) increase is nice but it is painfully obvious to me that I need to replace my disks als...

My company has 'white' noise coming through its speaker system. It is very effective in toning everything down from phone conversations in the next cubicle to seek on my notebook. Highly recommended for every office.

I want to upgrade my system and need some advice. I have not followed the latest innovations in PCs or silencing lately and need some input. Current setup: Motherboard: Abit KT7 Raid. There was an onboard Northbridge fan which I simply took off. Processor: 1300 Athlon, running at 1100 Mhz, undervolt...

My modded Zalman just recently died after about almost 2 years of service. I had to go back to my Whisper Enermaxx. What a joke. Whisper for about 2 minutes and then some... Anyway, the mod to the Zalman was simple enough. I added the Zalman resistor in and the PSU was ever so quite after that and m...

What is your system config? I used to have similar problems. One was caused by an older version of the highpoint raid driver. I used to have an el'cheapo soundcard from IOMagic that caused hissing whenever I had activity on the bus. I tried a gazillion things but ended up replacing it with a 5.1 Sou...

I have a SV-24 and simply used the stock fans and Zalman Fan Control units with all of them at the lowest setting. This includes the PSU which required some cable splicing to get this done. Three fans (case, CPU, PSU) with ZFC and a barracuda iv makes the SV-24 quiet and cool enough for my purposes ...

I got a zalman heatsink-cooler on my creative Geforce4 ti4200. works perfect. it's kind of hard to install it, but once it's done, the heatsink works fine! Installed the Zalman today. Took a little over an hour and works like a charm. Overall case/cpu temperature is a few degrees higher but nothing...

Shouldn't be a problem. Just double check that you've got room in the case for the Zalman. It'll take up a PCI slot, and some people have had trouble with the heatpipe hitting their RAM. I've got an HP-80 on my 9700 and it works perfectly. The install is kinda complex, but I actually enjoyed it. Th...

I couldn't resist and shelled out the $80 for a Ti4200-64MB at Best Buy. I have lived with noiseless VGA cards thus far and would like some input if the card can be used with the Zalman VGA heatpipe/sink. The card is labeled as a BFG Asylum but the one I actually got looks very much like this one ex...

What's the URL for the ibm ebay store? I found their clearance center but it had nothing to do with ebay.

Yes, the built quality is simply awesome with Thinkpads. I'd recommend one anytime (I don't work for them either... )

I got recently an IBM T30 (work) and it's the quietest notebook I have ever used, much improvement over the previous T21 I had. The fan shuts down frequently (50% of the time, light use) and the machine is completed silent except for disk activity. Only seeks are noticeable. Downside is that the T30...