Monday 29 July 2013

Linux machine running hot

I run several servers  for a company. Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed that one of the linux boxes was running much noisier and hotter than it normally does. I wondered initially whether this was due to the hot spell we have been having.
An inspection of the machine showed the culprit to be dust and fluff.
Switching off the machine and giving it a good vacuum removed the accumulated dust and stuff from the CPU heat sink and fan, from the graphics cards fan and from the power supply fan.
The intakes were also full of stuff. The worst machine was the highest up on the stack were the air flow is probably the greatest.
Before cleaning 20% energy usage Noisy Temp 67C
After cleaning 12% energy usage Quiet Temp 25C
It was about 3 months ago that I had cleaned the machines, so perhaps cleaning them more often will reduce the amount of electricity used and improve the performance.

Saturday 20 July 2013

Removing the crap from browsing

I have just spent an hour sorting out my fathers browser. Over the past couples of months he has noticed some extras added to his computer and today I spent about am hour uninstalling various programs that he seemed to have added. He had no idea where he had picked these up.
The managed to get the Babylon toolbar and search engine, rather than Google and several other tool bars that I didn't recognise. He had games galore interesting because he doesn't like games. He had a couple of different video players and well as some general rubbish. and some add-ons to Chrome.
He had lost his home page by adding a browser defender which of course didn't. He received adverts that told him his machine was running very slow, I suppose thus was true sine it was this causing the machine to slow down. Most of the programs were removed using the Control Panel program uninstaller. I sorted all the programs by date and in this way it was very easy to see what programs he had managed to install on the same date.
Some needed their own uninstall program but after an hour or so they were all gone.
The moral of this seems to be not to let my father play with the computer.