Iced Tea Forever

At the tractor pull last summer at the county fair in Goshen, this one tractor threw a rod right through the oil pan right in front of us. Pretty cool.

Here’s Grandpa (sitting on the bike) and Aunt Naomi and Uncle Luke out for a ride!

Click for full size.

When I built this computer a few years ago, I got an Antec Sonata tower. This is a great case, designed to be very quiet.

A month or two ago, the machine quit booting. It wouldn’t even boot to the BIOS. I pulled the CMOS battery and reset the jumper to clear it, all to no avail. I tried this and that and everything I could think of, but I couldn’t get it to boot for anything.

So I went down to Mapletronics to see my buddy Keith, and I bought a new power supply. It didn’t seem like a power supply problem, but I needed to try something and a bad PSU was certainly a better prospect than a bad motherboard!

I plugged in the new power supply and the computer booted right up. So I had found the problem. However, this tower being designed for silence, the original PSU had a fan-only lead for the chassis fan. It would run the fan at very low rpms unless the machine started running too hot, in which case it would speed the fan up as needed.

This new power supply didn’t have a fan-only lead like this, so the fan ran full speed all the time. Way too loud.

Here’s the old fan.

I contacted Antec and they agreed to send me a new replacement PSU upon receipt of the bad one. Several weeks later I got the new unit, and discovered that they don’t make the original unit for this case and they’ve replaced it with another one! Which, guess what, does not have the fan-only lead.

I called them up and explained what was going on. They then sent me a 3-speed chassis fan. It seems a little goofy, it has a hi-medium-low switch to control the speed. Not quite like controlling the rpms automatically, but I guess it should beat sounding like a cropduster flying through my office.

Putting in the new fan. I like to have soup close by on my workbench to keep up my strength.

Another obvious drawback is that you have to open up the case to change the fan speed.

There’s the 3-speed switch.

If you want one you can get it pretty cheap from endpcnoise.com. I got mine free though.

What a horrendously messy desktop! Both of them.

Mandy loves to sit on her Daddy’s lap, and she’s fascinated with the computer keyboard.

fgf gf bvgxxxxxx e3zc qx xesrzg g3rxz5esgc sXC42 gz1c Z#e S EDC c 2w1FCQ Q

Translation: “Pretty soon Daddy is going to teach me how to type. Then he is going to give me my own blog! But right now I need a new diaper and a bottle. Earlier today I ate a whole jar of green beans but I’m hungry again.”

Editor’s note: It wasn’t a quart jar.

1. There is nowhere for customers to park behind the post office.

2. Never try to stir soup while shaking a bottle.

3. Rivel is nasty. More on that later. I freely admit, I probably messed it up, but really, what can you expect from flour, salt, and an egg?!