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I was wondering why Trader Joes had cat treats not in the pet section.

Since I moved into Jeni’s house, we’ve had my computer in a little closet area and the computer on the built in desk. I don’t mind it so much for now. Obviously I miss my old, big desk that I built. Since the computer is on the desk, it’s right next to my head, and the noise has been driving me crazy, so this week I started poking around, working on figuring out what was the cause of the noise, while also looking at the temperatures of the CPU and graphics card. I don’t do any gaming anymore, so my demands aren’t that big. I’m not worried about the computer being hot, so i’m focusing mostly on the audible problem.

So, last night I pulled an internal fan out that just plain buzzed. Little quieter. I downloaded Speedfan and bumped the processor fan speed to 80%, which made a huge difference. The temps didn’t go up hardly at all… sitting right around 54*C, and jumping to 56* when I was playing a DVD.

I also tried messing with the side fan. It’s a standard 60mm fan built into the removeable side. I unplugged the fan, and didn’t notice a difference in temps. I plug it back in, nothing. But then I noticed that temps dropped dramatically while I had the side off… which led me to notice that when the side is on, that fan is *barely* moving any air at all. I open the side about an inch, and it starts blowing alot more air. So… there’s a major problem. Not enough air is getting in the case. So I bought a 120mm fan to go on the rear of the case, to draw air in.

I also and replacing the fan and heatsync on the graphics card. The fins stay nice and cool, but the fan is just buzzing all to hell. I stop that fan and the total noise of the whole box drops in half.

I also ordered a 500 watt power supply. The one I have in there now is rated at 350w/400w peak. My graphics card requires 350w. Uhhhhhhh… you do the math. When I boot up, I get a message that says it’s turned down the quality of the graphics card because of a lack of power.

And as long as i’m on it… when I started shooting photography in RAW format, I lost the ability to just use the built in WinXP scanner and picture downloader. I would have to take the CF card, plug it into the card reader in Jeni’s printer, download the pics to her laptop [very. very. slow.], then transfer the pics to my computer [again... slow]. So I bought a 3.5″ internal card reader. It’s the bizzomb. Now my RAWs are downloading wicked fast, and straight to my photos directories. FTW!

And I just realized I screwed up. The above 120mm fan I ordered has been discontinued. Well then how did I order it? And why did they charge me for it? I wonder if I got the last one or something like that. Contacting Newegg.