Dell T105 CPU Upgrade
Last year I broke down and bought a Dell PowerEdge T105 Server because it was relatively inexpensive and I needed a new Windows box at home. While it came out of the box with a modest Dual Core Opteron 1.8GHz cpu, I definitely wanted something faster in the future. Well the time came this week and I found the AMD Opteron 1224SE 3.2GHz on Newegg.com simply too good to pass up. At $115.99, the price is just right for an AMD based processor. This was an OEM processor, so it came as is, no heatsink or instructions included.
The PowerEdge T105 is pretty easy to upgrade. Since this was a processor upgrade, make sure your T105 Server has the latest BIOS update from Dell, if it needs it. Dell provides no documentation that I could find that the 1224SE is supported or not, so I had to gamble that it would work for me. You will want to look the Dell manual for uninstalling the Dell heatsink if you are haven’t removed the heatsink before. There are two screws you will need to remove and then plastic case surrounding the heatsink, comes loose when you lift it up and back. Once you have the heatsink off, you might want to clean it off and apply a small amount of Arctic Silver to the new cpu. In all the upgrade took less than 20 minutes.
So far the differences in speed are apparent when launching applications, however if you have not upgraded the memory, you probably should do that too. With the 8GB of RAM and Dual 3.2GHz Opteron the server feels a lot more responsive than the stock configuration from Dell. You can get the memory relatively cheap from Shop.Kingston.com and cheap AM2 processors from Newegg.com.
You ever work on something for so long that you start to think someone must be playing a joke on you, or at least laughing at you? This is the exact feeling I have when dealing with wireless networking. On the one hand, not having to run wires through your house and worrying about your dog or children tripping over them is nice, I am not sure the trade off is worth it. Let us begin with a simple home wireless network router and how the labyrinth gets complicated so easily can sometimes amaze you. Immediately you are encountered with a list of concerns that you never had with wired Ethernet, such as to secure the router or not? Any technical person would tell you that you need to secure it to prevent your neighbor’s kid from downloading all sorts of naughty things, because if you do not do this, ultimately you are legally responsible for anything that gets downloaded through your $50 router! Next you have to worry about signal interference, cause you do not want your wireless router to interfere with any cordless phone or other wireless router that your neighbor may have. Did I mention your microwave hates your router too?
Recently, I had the opportunity to diagnose a problem with an external Firewire drive and Mac OS X. The drive would no longer mount on the OS X desktop and the only place you could see it (other than Terminal) was in Disk Utility. If you ran Disk Utility – Verify or Repair, the message: invalid content in journal would appear. The fix to make it mountable again was to do the following in Terminal.