August 30, 2005
AAAAUUUGH!
Well, I called A&S today... initial estimate to get the transmission fixed is ~$2700 in parts and then some labor... erck! ack! ug! Good thing I was sitting down at the time!
... and yes, it was the same spline issue that I talked about in my Expensive Sound...! post ... we'll see if BMW will help me with this...
I think it's a plot to encourage me to buy a new BMW model...
Posted by Michael at 09:26 PM | Comments (0) | Motorcycles
August 29, 2005
<Sigh> Slow response...
Well, I've had my motorcycle at the A&S BMW Motorcycles shop since August 19, and I have yet to hear a peep. I knew the day I dropped it off (without appointment or warning or anything) that it would be a few days before they could get to it, but I can't help but be a little annoyed that it's been 10 days (7 working days) since I dropped it off and they haven't yet called... They told me they would be looking at it some time over the past week. I tried to call today but forgot that they are closed Sunday and Monday. I'll try again tomorrow.
Unfortunately, this is a little bit of a pattern; the last time I brought the 'bike in for service, I never got a call from them saying it was done. I finally called them a week after they said it should be done then called them; the service manager apologized all over himself for not calling earlier.
Unfortunately, even though it's a 45 minute drive one-way to get there from my home, it's still the nearest BMW service place. And for something that sounded as serious as the last break down, I didn't want to take it anywhere else...
Posted by Michael at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | Motorcycles
August 28, 2005
Quieter, but still very warm!
About a year and a half ago, as part of an incentive deal through the company for which Sherri & I work, we purchased a (near) top of the line Dell XPS computer to replace our very aged Pentium Pro-based IBM computer. It's a very awesome machine, with gobs more storage and processing power than we know what to do with. The unfortunate side effect of all this storage and power is a lot of heat. And, because the heat has to be removed from the computer case by fans, another side effect is a lot of noise. With our Dell system, it was so loud that it sometimes sounded like an idling jet airplane, and since the system sits in our living room, it sometimes interfered with the music we were listening to, or the movies we were watching. I finally decided to do something about it...
The design of the Dell computer case is interesting... there is a single fan in the front of the case, sucking cool air in. Then there is some fancy duct work over the CPU heat sink (which is fairly gigantic) leading to another 2 fans at the back of the case, which blow the hot air out of the case. When the temperature within the case goes up, thermal sensors tell the motherboard firmware to increase the speed of the fans in order to prevent the CPU from overheating. Of course, if the outside air is relatively warm already, it is more difficult to cool the CPU and the inside of the case, and then the fans will run at top speed all the time.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if the air temperature in our living room stayed fairly cool, but in the summer (especially the past month and a half!!), the heat doesn't just seep into the house, it gushes in. As the house A/C struggles to keep the house temperature down, the computer case fans struggle to keep the CPU temperature down.
The exhaust heat from the computer doesn't help the living room air temperature situation much either; sitting at the desk working on the computer, it feels like there is a small space heater under the desk... this would be great when the house temperature is 30 or 40 degrees F, but when it's more like 85 F, the last thing I want is a space heater roasting my legs!
Of course one way to get around both the noise and the heat is to shut down the system when I'm not using it, which I've been doing lately, but since we run a few services off that system, such as the Orb service and our "common" printer, I prefer to leave it on. So I started looking at other possible solutions.
One thing that I thought would be interesting is liquid cooling since liquid is so much more effective at removing heat than air. When I first thought about it, I discarded the thought immediately; with my luck, I would get a flakey part that would break inside the computer after I had it all together, and water would squirt all over the insides of my running system... Water and electronics generally do not go together well; adding live electricity to that mix will typically make things a lot worse. Besides, all the liquid cooling components were sold seperately, and so getting all the separate pieces together would have been a pain in the butt.
Then I ran across some reviews of liquid cooling kits. Finally some folks had the brilliant idea of putting all the liquid cooling components together into a single kit so that "average" folks like me could buy one thing and install it with a minimum of fuss.
I decided to buy the Cooler Master AquaGate system (see review at AusPCWorld.com) through TigerDirect.com. I received it several weeks later (there was a bit of a shipping snafu, but to their credit, TigerDirect took care of the issue fairly quickly), and waited until yesterday to tackle the installation.
Opening up the package, I found what looked like a rather frightening collection of hoses, wires, screws, and miscellaneous parts. Fortunately, the instructions were fairly clear; it was the disassembly of the Dell system that consumed the most time. Removal of the plastics (front panel, side panel, internal ducting) was really tricky because I didn't want to break them and it was very difficult to tell how they are attached to the case. The installation of the cooling system also required the removal of the motherboard, which also meant that everything had to be removed from the motherboard (video card, audio card, hard drive cables, floppy drive cables, power cables, etc, etc) in order to get it out.
Once everything was disassembled, the reassembly went fairly smoothly. All the parts in the kit where there and all fit together properly, which was a relief. I chose to have the cooling unit external to the case and to put the control panel inside the case; that added a little bit of work to the reassembly process but it all worked out fairly nice. Despite the frightening collection of parts, the install was pretty easy:
- install the cooling block on the CPU
- connect the liquid hoses
- install the small PCI card
- install the LCD panel in a spare 5.25" drive slot
- route and connect the cables to the PCI card and the LCD panel
- route the liquid hoses out of the case
- connect the liquid hoses to the cooling unit
- connect PCI card cable and power cable to cooling unit
- fill cooling unit with coolant
- start PC & keep reservoir full as the pump filled the lines with coolant
The picture shows the final installation, with the cooler sitting underneath the computer shelf and the control panel in one of the drive bays. This gives me the flexibility to move the cooling unit somewhere else, such as (possibly) to the other side of the desk.
I've had the system running with the new coolant unit for over 24 hours now, and so far I'm very impressed. I have no idea how hot the CPU got prior to the installation of this system, so I have to be a bit subjective about the results. Since I left the original fans inside the case, and I did not do anything with the sensors on the motherboard, I figured one way to determine the effectiveness of the cooling system was to listen to the speed of the fans within the case. If they went to full speed (and sounded like an idling jet airplane), then I would know the cooler was allowing the CPU to get just as hot as with the air cooled heat sink. If not, then I would know the cooler is more effective at removing the heat than the stock cooling system. I tried to work it extra hard today, by running the CPU constantly using a Grid project (which crunches out calculations whenever the CPU has nothing else to do) and keeping it running during the hot part of the day. I was amazed that the case fans never got switched to their top speed; the CPU temperature obviously never got high enough to trigger the maximum speed setting for the fans.
I'm fairly pleased with how well the cooling system works; I seem to have solved the noise problem handily. Unfortunately, the heat that is generated under the desk is still a problem for which I need to work out a solution... for a future project, I will have to figure out an elegant way to extract the heat out from under the desk...
Posted by Michael at 09:32 PM | Comments (0) | Technical
August 24, 2005
Flooding in Germany
Wow!! Pretty heavy flooding in southern Germany and other parts of Europe!
BBC NEWS | Floods cause havoc across Europe
Posted by Michael at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) | World
August 22, 2005
Expensive Sound...!
Something bad and expensive happened to my R1150RT on Friday... Didn't hurt me at all, but the 'bike, she's not in such good shape...
I was on my way to work, and I had just entered the freeway from our on-ramp. I was in the slow lane and was getting ready to go into the fast lane to pass a car. As soon as I accelerated, I felt and heard an "expensive" sound come from below me, and it seemed like there was no power anymore. I could feel the engine running and it still revved smoothly, but there was no connection between the engine and the rear wheel. I thought maybe the transmission had slipped out of gear (from 6th gear to between 5th and 6th, perhaps), so I tried shifting down and then up. No luck; I could still hear that nasty sound, like a clothes dryer running with a load of bolts in it, and there was still no power to the rear wheel. I realized then that something very bad had happened within the guts of my transmission.
I was extremely fortunate that I was heading down hill, and that the next exit was at the bottom of the hill. I turned on the hazards and coasted down the hill to the exit, took the exit, and then coasted to a stop near a furniture store. I tried shifting through all the gears but not one could move the 'bike forward, and all resulted in that horrible noise.
I rolled the 'bike into the furniture store parking lot and started to make some phone calls... first to Sherri to have her come pick me up, then to my boss at work, then to one of my team members at work to let them know I wasn't going to make it in.
Sherri came to pick me up, then we went home for the trailer, went back and loaded up the 'bike (with the gracious help of a couple of the loading dock guys), and then I went to drop off the 'bike at the dealership.
They haven't called me yet to tell me what the problem actually is, but after doing some research on the web, I strongly suspect it is a spline failure (See one discussion thread here). Unfortunately, my 'bike is out of warranty by 6 months and 6000 miles, so if this actually is the failure, I don't know if any of the repair cost will be covered by BMW. I will keep you updated...
Posted by Michael at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | Motorcycles
August 21, 2005
If there's anyone around that still believes this...!!
...then I'm shocked!! Unbelievable! Is there anyone in the U.S. that still believes that Iraq was a threat to our country?? Certainly there is no one in the rest of the world that believes it! If there is anyone in this country that still believes it, they must have their head so buried that their eyebrows are getting scorched from the earth's molten core...
Bush invokes Sept 11 to defend Iraq war
Posted by Michael at 08:15 PM | Comments (0) | Politics
