Posted inInformation Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Diablotek

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I have picked up power supplies from time to time just to have spares. Yes, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but, I don’t like the thought of having a machine down waiting for something as simple as a power supply. An even sadder situation is going to WorstBuy and paying $90 for a power supply I _know_ didn’t cost $12 wholesale.

My first indication of issues came while at a client site. I brought my quad core down to use as part of our compilation farm. After we moved to a new and quieter office my coworkers let me know they could hear that power supply 60 feet away. No biggie. I had a different brand spare back at my apartment. I swapped it over the lunch hour. More importantly, I spent several months working in an office with more than 9 machines and air lines for test equipment, and never heard a fan. I got used to it.

Of course, once you spend a week or two back home, unpacking and unwinding, you get that upgrade itch. I was avoiding scratching my itch until one of the two machines I had running BOINC started locking up. After an afternoon swapping spare parts, the video quit working. I bought an $8 video card, and that didn’t help. Of course, the seductive thing about BOINC is that it allows you to justify upgrading your current machine so your old machine can become dedicated to BOINC. After all, you are attempting to cure AIDS, cure cancer, find ET, and come up with a solution to provide pure water to everyone. At least that is the BOINC projects I’ve been supporting. Naturally I found a vendor on eBay who was selling a 6 core AMD with 8G of RAM combo for under $200. (Mobo + CPU + fan + RAM) Since I had terrible mixup buying some RAM a while back I had another 16Gig of DDR3 RAM which would not only work, but fit with the 8Gig. Who can resist having a machine with 24Gig of RAM?

The case with the problematic board would easily take my old mobo. One issue. The power supply was outdated. It didn’t not have the correct Mobo connectors. No problem. I had a brand new “spare” Diablotek EL series 400W still in box. Once everything was assembled I installed OS/4, BOINC, and subscribed to my projects. All was well. I sat back down at my desk in my remodeled garage office with carpeting, two ceiling fans, and a Carrier Weathermaker central air thing. After that something ordinary happened, the air conditioner shut off. From 24 feet away I can hear that fan, over the top of the sound my sub $50 ceiling fans make.

I got so used to working in silence that my hearing improved. Man that fan is both loud and annoying!

Suffice it to say, I don’t care how small the price is, I no longer buy Diablotek power supplies for spares. I just can’t put up with the noise. I can pay $15 for a Diablotek and be annoyed 24/7 or I can pay $28 for a power supply I cannot hear.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.