General computer talk/advice

Mine is a Be quiet! one, so ...

 

Hmmm... Why don't you press the "replace"-button that every PSU has beside the main fan then?
@Firepower Aha. I used an LC-Power for a loooong tim, I have to say it's indestructible. Until a certain point where you have to make an emergency operation transplanting a not-new one of the same kind over from a different PC. Only thing I know is that Corsairs are extremely reliable.

 

How about you shout its name?

 

Linustechtips reference ^^
Nope, it doesn't want do be loud, it's quite stubborn

 

"U ain't tell'n me not'n'!"- BeQuiet PSU, when it was born.

 

I might swap the fan in my psu, I have some spares of reasonable quality. No, I have little regard for warnings against maintenance on power supplies

 

It was never born. It's still inside its mother, the Silent Base 800

 

And already it's screaming like that?

I mean, I know what a screaming fan is. That old Phenom PC, aaaarghhh. That were the front fan, a 6cm piece of crap with highly air resistant parts everywhere aruond it, and a little bit also the PSU-fan. I think LC-Power stands for loud noises, crappy.

 

Well, you could poke the screwdriver into your eye while trying to get those little b***ards of screws out that you never have the right one for.

 

I open old PSU's all the time to replace bad capacitor's or clean them and I'm still alive, just gotta let the caps in the psu discharge first. Won't kill you if you do get shocked but it will give you one hell of a kick, I've been jolted my 230v mains three times so far working on older amplifiers.

 

VRAM != performance. The GT730 is rubbish.

 

after having a very quick play with target disk mode on a mac yesterday, I now fully support either the widespread readoption of firewire or widespread adoption of thunderbolt interfaces on all computers. Then I urge BIOS manufacturers to duplicate target disk mode. Its an awesome feature apple devices support.

Take any mac with firewire or thunderbolt. Turn it off. Link it to another computer with either a firewire-firewire cable or thunderbolt-thunderbolt cable (mac-mac also seems to work with thunderbolt to firewire cable, and mac in target disk mode with thunderbolt - a non mac with firewire apparently works, but not necessarily a non mac with thunderbolt to a mac with firewire). Hold T as you start up the mac. The mac will boot up as a firewire/thunderbolt slave device, specifically, an external hard drive.

Effectively any mac can be used over thunderbolt or firewire as an external hard drive. I think only the primary hard disk is supported, but you can quite nicely browse the contents of the hard disk over the thunderbolt/firewire cable as if it was a normal thunderbolt/firewire external hard drive. Pretty nifty.

 

That's a pretty cool concept. So you can use another mac as a external HDD for another mac? Wonder where the files get stored on the HDD of the slave device and if you can access them on said slave machine, would be really good way of transferring files from one mac to another.

 

Literally you get access to the entire hard disk, its effectively the same as pulling the drive from the slave mac and sticking it in an external USB/Thunderbolt/Firewire hard disk enclosure.

When using plain thunderbolt to thunderbolt or firewire to firewire, the mac running as a slave disk will also be recognised by non apple devices, its just windows PCs with thunderbolt or firewire are rare.
It appears a mac with thunderbolt will also be recognised by a PC with firewire using a thunderbolt to firewire cable (although even mac-mac this is a use case that apple dont officially support, its just one that seems to work).
The only problem case seems to be a mac with firewire running in target disk mode then being linked to a non mac device with thunderbolt. I dont think that works.

But yeah, I do have an old windows laptop with a firewire interface, my macbook has firewire. In theory I can use my macbook as an external hard drive for that laptop.



Would be cool if some PC bioses support this (as this is a more BIOS type feature, you boot into target disk mode rather than booting into OSX). Would also be cool to do it over USB although there are technical challenges in doing that which thunderbolt and firewire arent impeded by. Namely USB is a strict master/slave oriented protocol in which a host can never act as a device and a device can only be connected to a host. Thunderbolt and firewire both have zero concept of master/slave, its upto code running at the processor at each end to determine protocols for masters and slaves in software. This does allow the mac to simply load up software on the firewire port to allow the mac to act as a firewire hard drive.

 

Interesting. So this works will all Macbooks? I have one of the old core 2 duo white Macbooks with a broken screen laying around somewhere and my ThinkPad has a 1394 firewire port on it. Might try it if I can find the Macbook.

 

Even back into the PowerPC era.

Look it up. Target Disk Mode. We did it yesterday with brothers macbook to dads mac mini with a thunderbolt-thunderbolt cable.

 

"
When a Mac that supports Target Disk Mode[1] is started with the 'T' key held down, its operating system does not boot. Instead, the Mac's firmware enables itsdrives to behave as a SCSI,FireWire, or Thunderbolt externalmass storage device.

A Mac booted in Target Mode can be attached to the port of any other computer - Mac or PC - where it will appear as an external device. Hard drives within the target Mac, for example, can be formatted, partitioned, etc., exactly like any other external drive. Some computers will also make their internal CD/DVD drives and other internal and external peripheral hardware available to the host computer.[2]"


Ah heres a list of ones that dont work:

• iMac (Tray-Loading)
• Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) [7]
• iBook ("Clamshell")
• Power Macintosh G4 (PCI Graphics) [8]
• MacBook Air (2008-2009)
• MacBook (Unibody)

 

That's awesome, gunna go dig out that Mac. Hopefully I didn't toss it out.

 

The only issue with a windows host, is that windows doesnt support the HFS filesystem mac uses without extra drivers. I've used HFSexplorer to explore an HFS external hard drive on windows before though. There is supposed to be a way to extract apples HFS driver from bootcamp for installation on any windows PC too

 

Picked myself up a new case to compliment my new (used) motherboard and CPU. Saw the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M and though oh my... What a sexy ass case. (your opinion may vary). So I bought it and paid extra for 24hr delivery only to realize tomorrow or err well today in the UK is a bank holiday meaning no postal services are open thus I wont get it until the 30th anyway.