On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:58:47 -0700, PlainBill wrote:

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.

I've done a lot of home video from 8 and mini DV into DVD. Last one was
with a P4 # 3.0 ghz, hyper threading and 4 gigs of ram. It took hours
to encode a 20 GB raw AVI into DVD using Sony DVD Architect. I'm sorry
but I don't believe you.

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

You are being a bit narrow minded.



--
Live Fast Die Young, Leave A Pretty Corpse