Is this impending doom?

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1

[Tim Streater]

You mean I should have a large, largely empty, tower (thinks: where would I put it) instead of a Mini?

[Andrew Mawson]

When I plumbed in my external air line for pumping up tyres, I put it on QD fittings and keep a blow off gun next to it. Makes blowing out computer cabinets very easy and it's amazing what volume comes out! Being external all the grot disperses and doesn't get all over the office!

Andrew

[tony sayer]

Second that, leave 8 alone, 7 works very well indeed:)...

Glad to see the back of XP here..

[Peter Johnson]

I had similar problems a few years ago, I replaced everything except the PSU, then discovered that the problem was the PSU, the only failure I've had in more than 20 years of building my own PCs.

[Brian Gaff]

First find out what is making the sound. If you are lucky its the fans. A good clean and stuff does wonders If it is a drive, well it can be fiddly depending on how cramped the case is, but the biggest test of human patience is cloningover the hard drive. Take some advice and do it sooner rather than later, or you will need to reinstall everything and that is a pain in the backside as most things are out of date, cd discs lost etc etc, and many windows updates to download. Set aside a couple of weeks for this alone! Brian

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm... running quietly now.

Help coming Thursday so I'll get things backed up and then review the situation.

One problem for upgrading is Turnpike (mail and news reader) current version will not easily work on a 64 bit system.

Amazing how many posters know more than I do about computing... or perhaps not?

[Andy Burns]

While 64 bit makes it possible to expand memory above 4GB later without a re-install, not that many people need more than the 3.5GB limit of a

32 bit machine, so you could use win7 32 bit if you do decide to update the machine, and stick with tripnuke.

[philipuk]

They used to, but now they can be whisper quiet, you can go totally silent with a fanless PSU, fanless cpu cooler, SSD instead of a hdd etc. if you want.

[Andy Burns]

At the moment something which is solid-state makes the most noise in my tower PC (SSD, spinny discs all disconnected, slow 250mm case fan, CPU fan on minimum, no graphics card, no control over PSU fan).

Doing an "ls -lR /" is annoyingly noisy, whether the SSH contents are likely to be cached or not ... it could be the RAM or CPU, or maybe the voltage regulator or capacitors on the motherboard, can't really get my lug 'ole near enough at the moment ...

[The Natural Philosopher]

shove it in WINE under linux then ;-)

[John Williamson]

Buy a larger one with the same interface, making sure that the BIOS can handle the larger size. Put the new HD in a USB caddy or preferably connect it to a spare port on the motherboard. Make a boot partition the same size as the old HD. Clone the old HD to the new one, then make it bootable, using Clonezilla or one of the other HD cloning programs. Install the new HD on the old HD's port as master and reboot. Repartition new HD to use all the space. Revel in the massive amount of space now available for stuff.

Swear because old machine is now too slow to take advantage of the speed of the new HD. Give up and buy new barebones computer.

Works for me every time under XP and Vista.

[tony sayer]

In article , Tim Lamb scribeth thus

No it won't, thats why I haven't gone 64 bit. Not really needed anyway..

[The Natural Philosopher]

speak for yourself sonny.

I reckon 4 is the min these days for a decent response, and 6-8 is better, and if yu are prattinng around with video rescaling the more the better.

so you could use win7 32 bit if you do decide to update

I'd go linux and run that lot under wine or the old XP in a virtual box. .

>

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Peter Johnson writes

Hmm.. this PSU failed within a week or so of new and was replaced. Possibly with something bigger.

[Andy Burns]

I did say "not that many" ...

Still 4GB is fine for lots of folk who aren't doing anything special, most of the "showroom" laptops that come with 64bit Win7/Win8 only have

4GB, at least there's no "wipe and re-install" when people decide they'd like more.

My laptop has had 8GB for a few years, mainly to allow it to run virtual machines, my latest tower has 16GB for similar reasons.

Running Linux is fine if you know it, therefore people who do know will tend to already run it, but recommending Linux to all and sundry as a panacea isn't that helpful unless they also have friends/relatives who can help them in future ... I know too much of my time used to be consumed by "friends" with broken PCs, so I only tend to help close family and friends I've known for multiple decades now ... my mum probably doesn't know her machine *is* Linux :-)

[Nightjar]

I think you are replying to a Rod Speed clone.

[Andy Burns]

"Nightjar

[Nightjar]

On 08/09/2014 14:05, Tim Lamb wrote: ...

My last machine was 64 bit, but I found I didn't really need it and it caused occasional compatibility problems, so the current one, built a couple of months ago, runs the 32 bit version of Windows 7.

[Nightjar]