Heat problem?-- --Update: Cracking resumed.

[dennilfloss]

A friend started cracking yesterday with his 2month-old HP Pavilion 6640C (K6-2/500). Today he called me and told me that his computer has completely locked 3 times since last night. He had to do cold reboots. He suspects software incompatibility with the client, whereas I suspect elevated cpu temperature as the culprit. When I set up the client on his PC, I could feel just the slightest fan exhaust from his power supply vent. He says that it's been like that always and he's had no problem before. In the meantime, he has turned off the client.

 

[MWalkden]

I think he did the right thing in either case. If it is a heat problem then turning off the client may help, but only for a while

I'd open up his system and blow it out, check to see if the fan is still running at all on the power supply and make sure there isn't any dust covering the CPU fan/heat sink.

If it is the client causing the overheat it will show up soon enough. The client does add some heat (not much though) so heavy use, (playing games) will cause the same thing and you can say.......

Fix it for him and back on the client goes! Plus put 20 Bucks in your pocket for your trouble!

 

[Russ]

The circulation in the HP PC's is the worst imaginable. Since it is a K6-2, running the CPU at 100% could very well be enough to put it over the heat threshold in that system.

Russ, NCNE

 

[JimMc]

Probably heat. When I first started crackin, it caused my celery 366@550/W2K to *Gulp* take a big old Memory Dump . Very embarassing if it happened in polite company. The celery was lapped with an Alpha, my only recourse was to pull off the case and go barechested. No more problems, but I never had any heat problems before, RC5 is great for stress testing.

 

[dennilfloss]

Well. Even with the client and camera off, his system is now seizing after an hour of simple internet surfing and he says that there's no airflow at all behind his computer. I told him to take advantage of that superduper warranty and bring back his HP to Radio Shack. I bet his power supply fan has died. I for one will not open his case. That would void his warranty and he would start bugging me all the time. All I can say is that HP appears to is suck real bad so far.


Let them just fix his problem...so I can get him cracking for The Collective again.

Borgs rule!

 

[JonB]

I like the high end HP computers. Lots of air flow, plenty of vents. But, the new consumer versions, with their low prices, mean that sometimes the heatsink doesn't even have a fan, but relies on the power supply fan or a backplane fan for indirect flow. Dell and IBM do the same thing. I haven't opened a Compaq in a long time, but I'd bet it is similar. Moving parts equal higher cost, more failure points.

 

[jinsonxu]

Compaq does fo the same thing. I was personally quite shocked to find that their old 233MMX systems had no CPU fan. Yuck.

 

[DanC]

Jinsonxu -
Let's be fair about this - Compaq USED to do that.

My Armada laptop running NT cracks 7x24 - no overheating whatsoever. Certainly the Proliants have puhlenty of cooling... etc.
This sounds like a hardware issue for certain. Any fan can go south. Not as likely to be a design error on the part of HP.

 

[jinsonxu]

Call me Jinson.

Seriously though, i much prefer building my own systems. Most of my friends own Compaq computers though, not to mention my cousin. Have no idea why it's so popular around my area. Hmm....

 

[dennilfloss]

My friend got his HP checked. Both his power supply fan and his cpu fan are working properly. He says that the reason I felt no air flow at the back of his minicase is because the fan exhausts under it. :Q In any case, he was told that what hung his PC was probably the video surveillance camera operating in full motion rather than 1 pic per second or something on a PC with only 64MB RAM. He will be adding another 64MB shortly. In the meantime, he has uninstalled his camera software and has resumed cracking as a good Borg, getting about 550kkeys/s!

Go Borg!

 

[Engineer]

Fantastic....We need all we can get..

Thanks Dennil!

 

[DanC]

Bwahhh!

Und... Schmacken zum Umlauten..!