12 March, 2006
Dust. Anybody?
Blargh! I've been swearing at my computer.
I've been trying to collect data on the error between an actual and approximated surface with various parameters. It's quite CPU intensive - annoyingly, calculating error is more costly than making the approximation.
Every time it gets a few runs through, it's been rebooting. I guessed (correctly) that it was getting too hot. I blamed (incorrectly) the people who made the machine for not putting in adequate cooling.
After hours of swearing, messing around with a desk fan pointed at the open side of the case, under clocking and littering my code with sleep statements, I decided to take the fan off my processor.
Underneath, jammed between the fan and the heat-sink and even into the fins of the heat-sink, was about two years worth of dust.
A quick busting of the dust with the dust buster and all is well.
Better than well. My machine is actually running appreciably faster, since CPU scaling isn't kicking in any more.
I might tackle the grey fuzzy blob that used to be my graphics card next.
