My attempt to silence my noisy PC has failed, utterly. It is as irritating as ever. I bought a Zalman 7000B heatsink/fan combo, but when I went to install it, I ran into a problem. It needs two holes in the motherboard to install the mounting plate. And my MB does not have those two holes. I guess I should have checked beforehand, but I thought even if I didn't have those holes, I could drill some myself. No can do, there's too many traces cluttering the board, drilling holes would surely ruin it. :(

I did get my video card heat pipe installed tho. It took a long time, mostly because I was meticulously following the instructions to be sure I wouldn't screw up. I was going to install the optional fan that goes with it, but they didn't have it at the computer store. It hasn't made much of a difference noise-wise tho, I guess it's my CPU fan that's making the majority of the racket.

After installing all this crap, I was rebooting my computer, and it kept locking up at the "choose your operating system" screen. I was freaking out for awhile, but after going into the BIOS, I noticed the "SMART hard-drive" option had been disabled. Which was weird cause I certainly hadn't gone in there and disabled it! My CPU speed had also been set back to a lower speed. I guess the BIOS had gotten reset to its defaults somewhere along the line as I was working on the thing. My comp was running cooler at the slower speed tho. Before doing this stuff, she was running at about 35° C for the case temp and 55° C for the CPU. With the lower speeds when I first booted up, it was running around 45° C. Now back up to normal speeds, I'm getting around 50° C and the case is still around 35° C.

Since I can't install my new heatsink on this board, I'm going to try mounting a large [hopefully quiet] fan over the CPU heatsink and remove the old, whiny original fan. I've heard of people doing this with good results. And of course, I'll be monitoring the CPU temps to make sure it's not getting fried. Don't feel like doing this today tho.

I also added an extension to my desk to hold my scanner. My scanner was sitting atop my pc case, but I want to mount a fan at the top of the inside of my case to exhaust heat straight up outta there and my scanner was in the way. This actually went well, the scanner sitting higher up and on a more stable surface is good. Now I just need to install the additional fan in the case. It's probably going to take a lot of Dremelling as bot the inner frame and outer shell are in the way.

But that's not all! I threw in my new Hauppauge PVR-250 card while I had her open. It seems to work well, although the software included in the package is rather crap. I was editing the iremote.ini file earlier, it's pretty kewl. You can use the included IR remote to control any application you want. The video files saved by the WinTV program seem to be pretty good quality. Big, but good quality. It'll be nice to be able to record shows again, my VCR has been broken for years. Too bad it can't record the digital channels through the tuner, which leaves out the movie channels I'm subscribed to. Although I can leave my set-top box set to a specific channel and route the output to my PVR card for recording. I just need some new [very long!] cables for the video and sound.

The front fan wasn't getting much suckage, so I drilled the holes bigger and removed the grill on the inside. New fan, too.