Wegg’s Blog

I have a LOT of computers.  What usually happens in a big production is that the client will pay for a bunch of new equipment, I dive in and upgrade a whole bunch of stuff but I usually only get about half way through upgrading everything before my attention has to go back to “working”.  So my renderfarm is usually only about 75% of what it could be if I went in and discovered what went wrong with the other 25% that aren’t working right.

Two days ago I figured out why one of them was only able to see one of it’s internal cores.  The fix was to do a “repair” from the Windows XP install disk.  Now its a dual 3600+ Athlon X2 instead of a single.  So thats a free computer right there!

Last night I pulled a machine out of the “fix me!” rack and discovered the thermal paste had all dried up. . . hard drive was full of temp files etc. . . so I thought I’d update the drivers and bios while I was at it and discovered that the motherboard was capable of a much more powerful CPU than I thought it was capable of.  I thought it was an AM2 motherboard but it was actually an AM2+ and Asus had a bios update that let it recognize all the latest and greatest CPUs!  SWEEET!  So now for $112 I go from a combined 4ghz machine to 11.2ghz!  Thats like. . . discovering 4 machines when you thought you only had 1!

Very happy with these findings if you can’t tell.  :-)

My “Fix me” rack is still pretty big.  Wonder what other treasures I’ll find.  :-)