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January 18, 2010
Desktop Tinkering
I spent some time this weekend tinkering one of my home servers. I always max out the RAM in my boxes just because, it's so cheap these days, you may as well, right? My Dell Dimension 4550 had a gig of RAM in it, which is the max according to to Dell's website. But then, I realized fairly recently that the desktop could actually support 2 gigs of RAM, but Dell had just never bothered to test it with 2 gigs, for whatever reason. Of course, some bitheads tested it and they figured out that it would support 2 gigs, providing you had the right RAM and the right BIOS update.
I wanted to verify my motherboard and FSB, so first I ran this (Start - Run - Cmd and then enter "dxdiag"). This gave me some info, but not my FSB info. So then I downloaded and ran this handy little CPU-Z program, which is very slick. Tells you all kinds of information that you probably never wanted to know about your box.
I already knew I was running an Intel P4 CPU at 2.4Ghz. The main thing I got out of it was that my Front Side Bus (FSB) runs at 533 Mhz. Now, maybe this doesn't seem like the ultimate game machine circa 2010, but you have to realize that, unless I'm mistaken, I bought it approx 9 years ago in the winter of 2001. And the idiot UPS man delivered it to one of my neighbors across the valley. Like, we both ordered a PC from Dell and they got crossed somehow. Of course, mine was way more tricked out than his, so I called Dell and told them about the mixup and they straightened it out in short order.
I reinstalled the O/S on this box over a brief, but frenzied period of activity which greatly alarmed Timmy. The upshot of this activity was that I finally diagnosed the grinding noise emanating from within the desktop which had alarmed me so. Apparently, it is related to a drive controller that was operating two additional drives inside the server. Disabling the drive controller stopped the noise. There really wasn't any data on the drives that I was using, to the best of my knowledge, as they were made obsolete by the 4 Terabyte RAID Level 5 array I added in 2009.
Posted by Rob Kiser on January 18, 2010 at 10:27 AM
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