Finally Friday!

 And I now have a functional PC with a new 4TB Solid-State Drive, and a fresh installation of Kubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support. It's also much quieter as the fans on the video card aren't screaming at full speed trying to keep the card cool. The Root Cause appears to be a leak from a failed soldered connection on one of the four heat pipes used in the heat sink assembly. Oh, well.....I built this rig in 2012, so I definitely got my money's worth out of the video card.

The money I budgeted to upgrade this PC will be used on the workshop PC, and a National Instruments IEEE-488/GPIB Interface board so I can automate my HP test equipment.

Have a great weekend, and keep your pagers and walkie-talkies wrapped in aluminum foil.....

NOT the Motherboard!

 In a last ditch attempt to verify the problem was with the motherboard, I pulled out the video card I was using, and used the built-in video on the motherboard.

Holy Smokes! It's been running for several hours now, and hasn't locked-up once.

One thing I noticed the other day when I was under the hood was that a corner of the video board looked like it had oil dripped on it. I just looked at it under magnification, and one of the heat pipes on it had sprung a leak, and the coolant (silicone oil, I believe) leaked out. Why the hard drive was active during the lock-ups remains unknown. I suppose the video could have locked up the PCIe bus by sending out garbage and hanging up the bus, but I have no way of testing for that.

I still need to upgrade this computer in the workshop, so the $$ budgeted for my main PC can be put towards that.

Now I have to transfer all my stuff from the hard drive that was in that PC to the new Solid State hard drive I put in it.

Hang in there, it's Wednesday, and that means it's all downhill to the weekend. And we're forecast to have a VERY wet (1~2") weekend!

Testing 1....2....3....

 Trying to post from the basement shop PC. My main PC appears to have a terminally ill motherboard.

Posting/Commenting Issues Solved.....and One for Phil.....

 By dumping Firefox. I've been using Firefox since Netscape morphed into it, and I've been very content until lately. It started refusing to post comments on any Blogger site due to "Cross-Site Tracking Cookies", and I couldn't even reply on my own blog. It was also running slow, and randomly locking up, sometimes tying up so many System Resources that it was very difficult to use the mouse and keyboard.

So now I've switched over to Falkon, a more "lightweight" browser. And in the middle of this, I did a major OS update, and forgot to plug the PC into the wired network. BAM! Lost my wireless connection, and spent a couple of days getting that squared away. I'd really rather have a wired connection to the router, as I was getting 750MB download speeds with very low latency (no lag monster), and I max out at 25MB on the 2.4GHz wireless link, and 75MB on the 5GHz wireless link. I'll have to check the specs on our 7 year old router, and my equally old wireless adapter and see where the bottleneck is.

And as usual for this time of year, I'm really busy. I have a ton of year-old Didn't Get Done things to take care of, and after all the ups and downs and recovery time of last year I'm making up for it as best I can. Between watching a grandson or two, cutting up a bunch of firewood, yardwork, attending family gatherings, a HoneyDew list that never ends, and working on my own projects.

Repairs on my friend's Fisher SR-2010 are continuing at a slow pace. After finding capacitors in the Amplifier section that were running Danger Close to their maximum ratings I started going through the schematic looking for others, and found half-a-dozen more "At Risk" capacitors, so I'm going to change them, too. They're "$2 Parts that cost $100 to fix", so out they go!

And here's the one for Phil I promised.....

Nice clean, shiny, NEW water pump, timing belt, tensioner, and spring. And everything around them is getting a good scrub, and paint touch-up where required.

I do love working with nice, clean, shiny stuff. Getting here is a lot of tedious, time-consuming work, but oh so worth it.

Enjoy your weekend, use your time wisely, and always stay in Condition Yellow. I have a feeling things might get a bit spicy in the next few months.....I just wonder how BIG a cheat The Evil Ones are planning to pull off come November.......