[GLLUG] desktop freezing??

[Richard Houser]

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The higher efficiency stuff is quite a nice bonus too.  I just picked up
a couple Antec Earthwatt series power supplies and my newest build pulls
34 to 52 watts (most commonly floating around 40) from the wall during
normal desktop tasks.  Hardware is a 4000+ AM2 on an Epox Nvidia based
board (including graphics), 4x1GB DDR2 sticks, 120MM case fan, and a
400GB WD sata drive.  Under light loads, I think that's actually more
power efficient than my laptop (and a heck of a lot faster in all cases).

In fact, I really don't get the whole high-wattage power supplies thing
anymore.  My gaming rig only pulls somewhere 120 watts from the wall if
I intentionally throw a ton of miscellaneous tasks at it to
intentionally strain every bit of hardware.



If you think memory could even remotely be a cause, it's worth it to run
memtestx86 on it.  I just finished running it on that new build (testing
4GB takes a little time) and there really is no substitute for the time
savings.

Karl Schuttler wrote:
> You can get a decent power supply these days for 30, 40 bucks. Just
> throw a little money at the problem and see if it fixes it. If it
> turns out to be not the case (gadunst), you'll have a powersupply
> handy for when one of the ones you have being used dies in the next
> six months.
> 
> On Nov 29, 2007 9:30 AM, Sean O'Malley <picasso at madflower.com> wrote:
>> It sounds like your power supply might not be big enough to handle the
>> bigger drive. It could be a bad board or bad caps, etc. and stuff that has
>> already been mentioned.
>>
>> To throw some other things out on the "possibility" list because they are
>> "odd" errors.
>>
>> I had an issue with a series of USB 1.1 cards where one port put itself to
>> sleep it was after like 30 minutes, and you could be in the middle of
>> typing something, and just flat out went to sleep. my keyboard and mouse
>> were connected to it, so basically it felt like the windowing system hung.
>> By switching the USB ports the keyboard and mouse were it fixed the issue.
>> It was literally a hardware issue and I had to send the card back. It was
>> a whole chipset series that was bad which was OEM'd to various venders.
>> (the black screen maybe because the card went to sleep, the system thinks
>> it is there and is trying to talk to that device, but it is timing out.)
>> This might appear if you switched where the usb cables were plugged in
>> while adding/swapping out the drive. You might try swapping around the
>> cables.
>>
>> If it isn't enough power to the USB devices, as the USB bus can only
>> handle 500mA of current per controller, you might try a powered USB hub if
>> none of your devices are actually powered. Most 4-port usb cards are two
>> controllers with a two port hub so ports 1-2 use controller A, and 3-4 use
>> controller B.  If you switched cables around, the current draw per
>> controller also changed.
>>
>> Along the sleep issue lines, sometimes drives will put themselves to
>> sleep. You might be trying to access say a screen saver on a drive that
>> went to bed on ya and the system can't wake it up. This is a usually a
>> scsi issue.
>>
>> It could be memory issue usually those are only consistant errors during
>> startup on linux, where you are loading programs in memory exactly the
>> same way everytime. An easy way to test this is to swap memory card slots.
>> It may not have appeared before because you wen't actually USING that
>> memory. IE you loaded a driver for a worm drive into the bad ram.  Since
>> you added a bigger drive, the in memory cache may have increased thus
>> shifting where everything is/was loaded in memory.
>>
>> A similar issue is where your drivers are loaded on your drive. You might
>> be using a "new" driver that was written to a bad sector on the drive.
>>
>> Most of this stuff shows up in the logs in one form or another.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 28 Nov 2007, Michael Rudas wrote:
>>
>>> Benjamin Cathey wrote:
>>>
>>>> As far as Power Supplies go - the more wattage the better, correct?
>>>>  The system will only draw what it needs, right?  Or am I remembering wrong?
>>> Mostly right.  The efficiency and power factor ratings of
>>> higher-wattage PSs is kinda variable, but differences are (usually)
>>> minor, especially for quality units.  A 400W PS would not be overkill;
>>> an 800-watt one would.  I still think the PS is the problem, but check
>>> the caps, as well.
>>>
>>>> I figured Linux would have a message somewhere if the problem was overheating though.
>>> It was only a suggestion based on experience.  Linux can't read ALL
>>> thermal-monitor ICs, unfortunately -- but the BIOS can.
>>>
>>> ~~ Mikey
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> linux-user mailing list
>>> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
>>> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>>>
>>
>>
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