MaximumPC 2007 02

00 MAXIMUMPC XXXXXXX 2007

WAIT FOR IT...

I have a Shuttle XPC that I built using an Athlon

XP 2600 about three years ago. I use this rig as a

kitchen computer to store recipes, keep a grocery

list, send email, and edit photos.

The problem started about a month or so ago:

When I hit the power button, nothing happens

for a while. In other words, the little machine has

developed a bad habit of ignoring the on switch for

several minutes before coming to life. It never fails

to ultimately turn itself on, but sometimes the time

elapsed between hitting the button and the com-

puter coming to life can be five to 10 minutes. What

does this mean?

—Emery Borsodi

The Doctor has a similar machine, but it boots

just fine. The delayed power up could be related

to a problem with the power supply (a common

problem with small formfactor machines, which

must use reduced-size, underpowered PSUs).

When you turn on your PC, the motherboard

tells the PSU to turn on, then the mobo waits

for a Power Good signal from the power supply.

The Power Good signal tells the motherboard

that all the voltages are correct and it’s safe to

boot up the motherboard. It’s possible that your

PSU is starting to fail and taking an excessively

long time to send that Power Good signal. This

could very well cause the several-minute delay

in startup.

A less-likely problem could be related to

the motherboard itself, which might be read-

ing the Power Good signal improperly. That’s

extremely unlikely though. If you want to do a

quick check of the power supply, buy a power

supply tester such as Frozen CPU’s (frozencpu.

com) $28 Ultimate LCD Power Supply Tester. In

addition to telling you what voltage your unit is

putting out, it’ll tell you what the unit’s Power

Good signal is.

IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE

I’ve been through about four different nForce4 SLI

boards from Asus. I thought the random problems I

was having with the system might be heat related,

so I stuck a thermal probe on the heatsink for the

northbridge chip. It registered 97 C. Do all newer

nForce chipsets run this hot? What’s the melting

point of silicon? How can a system be stable at

these extreme temperatures?

—Scott

As a general rule, trying to read a chipset’s

temperature from the heatsink leads to inac-

curate results. Since you’re not reading from

the die or even under the heatsink, the heat

from other components can throw your readings

off. If you want a more accurate temperature

reading, download Nvidia’s nTune utility, which

should correctly read the chipset temps directly

from the on-die sensor.

With that said, you should know that Nvidia

chipsets actually run quite a bit hotter than

competitors’ chipsets. In the nForce4 days, the

Doc was told Nvidia’s chipsets could produce

twice the heat of a comparable Intel chipset.

Even so, the 97 C you’re seeing (if verified using

nTune) is way too hot and may be indicative of

other cooling issues within your case. You should

add additional fans in your case to keep the air

moving through it. If adding more fans doesn’t

get your temps down, you may want to consider

mounting a small fan directly on the chipset with

the air blowing directly onto the heatsink.

Also, the melting point of silicon is 1,414 C,

so it’s unlikely you’ll have a problem with that.

JUST CAN’T STOP THE U-S-BEAT

I have several different USB devices,

thumb drives, and some external hard

drives. When I right-click on the Safely

Remove Hardware icon in the system

tray and then select the device I want

to remove, I usually get the message

“The device ‘Generic Volume’ cannot

be stopped right now. Try stopping

the device again later.” Which part of

Windows is annoying me this time and

how do I fix it?

—Dan Hunter

The Doctor is glad you don’t take

the easy route and just yank the

thing from your system—actually,

in trying to come up with ways to

fix your problem, the Doc did just

that. Oops!

You should first try stop-

ping any processes that might be

accessing the drive in some capac-

ity—this could be a virus scanner,

an audio program, or just an open

Explorer window.

For a good way to

see what’s using

the device, grab

Unlocker (http://

ccollomb.free.

fr/unlocker/), install

it, and then right-click on your USB devices

in Windows Explorer and click Unlocker.

Ideally, it should tell you if anything is

accessing the drive, so you can kill the

offending application.

Sometimes Unlocker doesn’t find the

offending app. If that’s the case, you’ll need to

grab Process Explorer (http://tinyurl.com/sjzno).

You should be able to use this little app to find

out what’s accessing your drives; you can then

kill it yourself by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete and

clicking over to the Processes tab.

Of course, if you have Optimize for Fast

Removal checked in the Policies tab of the

Drives Properties window in Device Manager,

you can remove the drive without bothering

with Safely Remove Hardware.

IT HERTZ, IT HERTZ

I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro videocard con-

nected to a ViewSonic PT813 CRT monitor. For

some reason, the monitor will display only at a

60Hz vertical refresh rate. I know this because

my monitor has a built-in “view meter” that tells

Love is in the air, and there’s no greater gesture of geeky romance than

fi xing that special someone’s biggest computer issue. But if you don’t

think you have the answers, the Doctor is more than happy to provide

that little spark. Send a detailed description of the issue to doctor@

maximumpc.com , and he’ll set his team of Cupids to work on fi nding

the lovely solution to your needs.

58 MAXIMUMPC FEBRUARY 2007

how (^2) IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
Disabling the EDID is the easy part. Just don’t set
the values incorrectly, or you can kiss that moni-
tor goodbye!
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