July 16, 2003
Bas Heijermans has been
using computers for 25 years - since he was 12. Bas lives in Belgium and has used
OS/2 since version 1.1. He ran The OS/2 BBS and was the Belgium OS/2 Fido moderator.
IBM awarded him Official OS/2 Ambassidor in 1992 for his support efforts.
Today he repairs computers for a living.
If you have a comment about the content of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums.
There is also a Printer Friendly version of this page.
|
Previous Article |
|
Next Article |
OS/2 is Boring, Number 12
First of all, I want to show you my doggy, as Hera is her name, she does keep me company on all my articles.
In fact, she's as stable and reliable as OS/2 is:-)
She has been my OS/2 article supporter the last year.....and she's my biggest fan so far.......:-)
Silence
This time I want to talk about something that isn't really OS/2, but will make OS/2 shut up on the noise level of modern PC's.... As you know, it's very disturbing to hear OS/2 running in the back when it can be done very silent. My server is practically noise free....
There are some way's to get there.....
First of all, make sure all wires in the case are tied together, this will reduce the noise a little.
The next you can do is, take out the powersupply (if it doesn't have a wire-frame-grill) and remove the standard grill and replace it for a wire-grill. A dremel with a metal cutting blade can help a lot here....
Then we get to the CPU-cooler, you can get a silent one or in case of many OS/2 systems it will be a bit old, you can solder a small resistor in the red-lead of about 50-100 Ohm (make sure it's a 1 Watt or bigger type) to reduce the RPM's of the fan. Beware, your fan needs to keep running, it shouldn't stop when you do this.... This will give some more silence to your system. If it's a new system, checkout the Spire
The next we do is download some software to regulate the noise-level of the harddisk, as IBM and Maxtor (probably others too) have utils where you can regulate the performance/noise levels. After set that level for IDE disks (don't know about their SCSI counterparts, but I expect they don't have that).
We can move on to the next level, make the case very silent.....
I expect you know this kind of material, I think they call it silence-damping-foam, it's used under motor-engine-hoods as well as in speakers. I used this stuff to fill every hole in my server and between the side plates of the case. You shouldn't forget to remove the front of the case and also put the stuff in there. After you filled the entire case with that stuff, like you build a new case in a case with the foam...... You will find that two things will happen:
- You won't know if the system is turned on or off:-)
- You will see that the temperature of the system will drop a little.
At times I have to ask others wether my server is running or not..... As we do like to run OS/2 as stable as we can and we don't like to be bothered with crashes or reboots..... It's time we goto the next level, we don't want to hear OS/2 running:-)
Have fun, why is OS/2 still boring? Well if we got it silent as well, we might forget it's there:-)
- Bas.
|
Previous Article |
|
Next Article |