Tuesday, October 12, 2004

My next Freeview Set Top Box.....

Found this thread on the forums entitled Freeview Set Top Box - No red dot ever. Interested? - TiVo Community Forum which lists a couple of good set top boxes


Quote:
"Also, the SetPal-based STBs (Labgear DTT-100, Daewoo-DS608P, Triax DVB2000T) have a very strong tuner, so are useful in weak/marginal signal areas where other STBs give picture break-up."

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

BIOS bug killed

I have sorted the power on "Fan Failure - press F1 to continue..." problem. A bit of a sledgehammer solution, not a *nice* solution.

I had a look in dells forums for information on the GX110, and came up with this post which gives a workaround for the BIOS warning problem.

It seems that the third wire just gives feedback about the state of the fan where 12v = fan turning, and 0v = fan stopped. The solution is just to connect the 12v red cable directly to the pin where the which cable was.


http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_bios&message.id=31560

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

New Kitchen PC arrives

The PIII 733 I ordered from eBay arrived today, and I got it up and running tonight. It is a lot faster than its predecessor, the K6-2 machine, although it is a lot noisier.

But, I got the screwdriver and snips out, and removed the fans from the PSU and the CPU, and replaced them with a couple of old fans, an old PSU fan for the CPU, and an old 486 fan for the PSU. I then wired these two fans in series, which slows them down considerably, and makes them an aweful lot quieter.

The heatsink on the PSU is a lot hotter now, but it has been running for some time, and it seems fine. By fine I mean no fire.

The only problem which remains is a BIOS warning. When I disconnected the origonal CPU fan it had 3 pins, black, red and white, but my new fan only has 2, black and red. The white is obviously some kind of monitor to allow the motherboard to panic if the fan stops. So now on startup it tells me there is a fan failure, and press F1 to continue. There is nowhere in the stone age BIOS to configure this alarm, so we may have to live with it.... bit annoying, no remote reboots.....