Posts about hardware

Solving PC not powering on at all

I recently solved a problem with my home PC failing to switch on. I thought I was facing a significant hardware fault, because I've never before faced a problem where the PC doesn't turn on at all.

The computer is named Theseus because it has had parts replaced for over a decade, and I wondered whether the fault was something serious — I have had a failed Voltage Regulator Module in the past, causing a melted ATX header on the main circuit board, and having to replace main board, PSU, and CPU/RAM, because my existing ones were too dated for any available "motherboards". Or maybe the problem was more benign — perhaps the 13-year-old case has a faulty power switch? But simply bridging the PWR header on the main board did not resolve the power-up failure, so I put off further diagnosis until this last weekend.

The final answer was at once simple, but also surprising! I learnt that a badly seated NVMe M.2 device can cause a short circuit on the 3.3V rail in such a way that the main board/PSU protections cause power delivery to scram, even before POST.

I honestly don't understand how the NVMe became unseated, since it is held in place by a screw. But I am happy to have found and fixed the fault without having to replace any components. This would have been difficult and expensive in the current computer economics situation.

A full diagnostic report follows, for future me.

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New Printer “Just Works” in SUSE 10

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.

Well, here's a first for me: go to local Dick Smith's, buy a cheap printer, for my wife (HP Deskjet 3940, AU$66). Because I don't really care about printing from Linux, I didn't care if it works or not on that OS, just bought whatever Windows printer was cheapest.


Brought it home, plugged it into my PC (in Windows) and it works, after installing drivers and software and about 15 mins of setup time.


For the heck of it, I rebooted to Linux to see what would happen. Well lordy “New hardware detected: HPdeskjet3940” and an offer to set it up. After 5 minutes — just accepting all the standard options — out comes a test page, in colour, bi-directional and fast.


Neat. Linux is ready for me....

Problems with my CD recorder

This post was originally posted at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 10 February 2006.

I think I may have figured out the issue with my CD recorder. It seems to fail more when the weather is hot (as in, more than 32° C ambient). The internal case temperature would be in the low to mid 40s then, and this is probably close to the maximum operating temperature for the device (a SONY CD-RW CRX140E).


Bummer.


So, either I confine my CD writing to early in the morings on hot nights, or I evaluate some sort of cooling solution.

Radeon Performance Enhancement

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 30 March 2005

Place these settings in your xorg.conf:


The RADEON driver (man radeon) supports the following options for the RV280 chip (which is found on RADEON 9200 boards). The default values are in red:


  • Option "AGPMode" "1" (driver currently supports up to x4)
  • Option "AGPFastWrite" "off" (only used when DRI is enabled)
  • Option "BusType" "AGP" (if driver's bus type detection is wrong)
  • Option "DisplayPriority" "AUTO" (set to "BIOS" or "HIGH" to fix tearing)
  • Option "EnablePageFlip" "off" (turn "on" 3D page flipping for better performance)

The biggest wins would come from APGMode and EnablePageFlip. APGFastWrite may help DRI. DisplayPriority may help KDE. Don't use BusType unless the log shows the driver has selected a PCI bus for the card...


Note:- when playing with Xorg 6.5 I got X crashes with EnablePageFlip turned on.