well maybe it has been a while
since i bought some more of this
thermal paste stuff?, oh well
*eats remainder of arctic silver 3,
promptly falling unconsious*

sorry for being a bit rude, but
this PC thing is worrying the
"bejezus" outta me.

to demonstrate my love of my PC:
if it fell out the window of a 40
story building, i'd jump out after
it, to soften its fall!

please help me!

@AoD,

Wild-assed guess based upon absolutley no knowledge whatsoever.....

AMD Proc? Reputable re-seller? Are you overclocking?

Oh, so now you want help, eh? Alright, let's start from the top. Firstly, what kind of grills does your case have? Stamped or wire? Also, check your BIOS settings. Is the processor set to default? You haven't bumped up the voltage to 1.8 have you?

yeah

well the case is made of acrylic,
and it has built in grills;


i cant mess with the bios,
remember, OEM MSI-6577

so yes the P4 is set to default

Ick, stamped grills! Still, they are better than the usual (cheap metal case) junk! Mmm, do you have a utilitiy that you can use in windows to check the MB Temp, Case (ambient) temp, and the voltage?

i use (always) coolmon and MBM 5

running now it says:

@aod i assume those figures are at rest ie no heavy proggies running what is the temp when you load it up
btw there is a nice wee free app called "end it all" ideal for shutting down all the useless things running in one click (not your cure but handy to have)
do you have a cooler fan on your northbridge?
one of the "flat cooler fans" directly above the graphics card can be worth a few degrees in the case and a couple of degrees in the cpu ;if you can get hold of that type of fan
are your case fans working with or against each other ie sucking in at the front and sucking out at the back as ive seen many a pc with the fans sucking out front and back kinda spoils the whole effect
some good/dangerous info on proccesses that can be closed is available
blackviper
one other thing that will affect your temp slightly is the case acrylic cases are not as effective in heat dissapation through the case as metal ones this can make a couple of degrees difference purely due to the thermal properties of your chassis

Steel is right about all of that. What do you have running?

About background programs, how do I see what they are and how much
of my ram they're eating. Im running win 98.

Check you lower right. All those icons in the corner.

also right click on My Computer, go to properties, go to performance, and it will give you a percentage expression of available system resources. On a decent 98 system at install, properly configured, this should be over 90% free. the more stuff you put on, the lower it goes. Less than 40-50% free, you will notice serious system degradation, less than 30% (8 just won't run. If you go start, run, and type msconfig, then go to startup, you'll see a list of all the apps 98 loads, if you're kazaa-ing or other p2p stuff, printer/scanner utlities, multimedia players, registration programs, Office startup, all that junk, NONE of this necessary as the progs will all start on demand anyway, all youre doing is pre-loading them into memory you should be keeping free. If you do a ctrl-alt-del (once) you'll see a list of all active programs, other than firewall and anti-virus stuff, you should only have explorer, systray and rundll32 in there and anything else that's essential.

With proper tweaking and streamlining, you can get these system resources easily back in the high numbers 70s 80s even 90s.

Yeah. (Well Taw can get away with it, why can't I? )

Thanks Taw, I managed to knock the available system resources up to
around 70% from 46% one one of them and up to from 60% to 75% on the
other by getting rid of all the office/printer crap. There is still some more
stuff i could get rid of, but I doubt the secretary would knoe how to start it back up. (we have a office at home)

Edited by - dark_reaper on 4/14/2004 11:16:02 PM