On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:41:11 +0000 (UTC), Meat Plow
wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:44:24 -0700, PlainBill wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:31:32 +0000 (UTC), Meat Plow
wrote:

On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:26:58 -0400, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

KenO wrote:

Inherited a Dell Dimension 2300 that suddenly shut down for some
reason besides a power outage.

Found reason when opened the case and found a broken P4 cpu heat sink
retainer and loose heat sink.

Did some searching and found others with same problem.

For example:

"The heatsink is clamped onto a black plastic moulding which appears
to be screwed onto the motherboard and surrounds the CPU socket. On
of the 'legs' which sticks up from this has broken. As a result one
end of the heatsink cannot be tightly clamped to the CPU.
http://groups.google.com/group/uk.co...browse_thread/
thread/
aa39dd6016df30b9/d2b013fe15c9c2ab?hl=en&q=broken+P4+heat+sink
+retainer#d2b013fe15c9c2ab

"When i opened the box to clean it out (been sitting in the same
place in the shop for 5 years) I found one of the heatsink retainers
just lying in the case. Upon furter inspection i found that the
plasic square box that is mounted to the motherboard that the
heatsink attaches to is broken."
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=465220

Since this OEM part tends to fail would like to do a more permanent
repair.

Did a search using [best P4 CPU heat sink retainer] but so far have
not found anything of interest.

Am open to any comments, suggestions, tips...


Pentium 4 Socket 478 Heatsink Retention Module $1.59:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...6W1-51&cat=CPU

Those don't always work on Dell. Last one I worked on the bolt pattern
didn't line up with the holes in the mainboard. Most dell desktop used a
single 120mm fan mounted on back drawing air through a shroud encasing a
heatsink of fins that was about 4 or 5 inches tall. This one was in
pieces when it was given to me and part of the original retainer were
missing. This was an LGA also. I did find the missing part later at a PC
shop a friend owns. He said he had just had one in that the mainboard
was toast. Not a great machine, hyperthreading single core 3.0 ghz
Intel. Got to have at least a dual core these days.
Ahh, the luxury of unreasonable feelings of entitlement!!!

An acquaintance sent over a Thinkpad X40 a couple of weeks ago. He'd
picked it up for $20 at a flea market. 1.2Ghz Pentium M, 500 Megs of
RAM, 20 Gig hard drive, wireless networking, no CD drive, Win XP. He
thought he had 'bricked' it trying to install Win7 from a thumb drive.
After 5 minutes investigation I found the 'clover leaf' power cord was
bad. I hook up a good power cord, it works, the battery even takes a
charge, and send it back to him.

A week later he reports he added another Gig of RAM ($30) a new power
cord ($5), and Win7 and it works wonderfully. "It's the ideal system to
use at a coffee shop".

So for under $100 (a significant portion of which was for shipping) he's
got something that is faster than an iPad, has a real keyboard, and can
be upgraded. Not all people measure their importance by the speed of
their computer.

PlainBill

My Dell Mini 910 with 8 gig SSD runs 7 Professional perfectly It has an
Intel Atom hyperthreading CPU that runs at 1.3 ghz and 2 gigs of DDR2
ram. I have an additional 8 gig SD card in it for storage. Cold boot time
to login screen is about 30 seconds. So I'm not bashing lower performance
computers. Just for some things, a dual core is needed. I upgraded my
son's HT 3.0 ghz single intel to a dual core, he plays games. It
increased his video frame rate from 15 fps to 30. Some of those games
need at least a dual core. Myself I run a quad core AMD Phenom II 955
on an Asus M48At-E mobo with 4 gigs Corsair DDR3 FSB at 1600 MHZ.
I can encode raw avi video into MPEG2 at about 200 FPS. What took hours
on a single core 2.0 GHZ AMD64 now takes minutes. So again it all has its
place. I still have an Asus M6Bne, 1.8 ghz 15.4 widescreen laptop from
2004 I use daily. And an Athalon T-Bird 1.0 ghz box downstairs not being
used.
You mention two purposes where higher performance is appropriate.
I'm of the opinion that few people (other than professional game
developers) NEED a higher performance system. Encoding video can be a
different matter. Years ago I discovered a 2.4Ghz P4 with 1 Gig of
RAM could transcode a AVI file into DVD format VIRTUALLY in a matter
of minutes - I started the process before going to bed, in the morning
there was a DVD waiting.

Not that there is something wrong with using a high performance system
for trivial purposes; Intel and AMD's bottom line would be less
impressive if the only market for their high end processors was Civil
Engineers designing a suspension bridge.

PlainBill