Viz Vista by Ed Tittel

In a recent blog of mine "Hot outside, hot inside too", I reported on the effects of a failed air conditioner on the temperatures inside my PC. Now that repairs on complete and things are back to what passes for normal around here, I thought it might be interesting to see how current temperatures compare. Incidentally and interestingly, it seems my memory of how my PC works and how it actually works are reasonably close, if not completely in agreement.

It's hot, hot, hot here in Round Rock, TX. And alas, when I say it's hot here, I mean in the house! Our inside cooling stack for the main A/C apparently iced up yesterday, and quit working. I've had to cut the main unit off, so our only cooling in the house right now is literally trickling down the staircase (the coolest place in the house) from the still-operational upstairs unit and providing some cooling for the whole house.

In putting my production machine back together, I noticed that my disk drives and my passively cooled graphics card were running a bit warmer than I might like. So as I took the machine apart to replace the drives I also popped the front cover off and installed a ThermalTake 120mm TurboFan in front of the drive cage at the bottom of the case.

In the past two weeks, I’ve built a new Windows Vista system and upgraded the CPU on my primary production machine. In each case, I’ve seen problems pop up afterward that caused the Windows Reliability Monitor to report errors and related problems on those machines, and have watched their reliability scores plummet accordingly.