about 2 years ago, dell did some work on my inspiron 5150 because it was having some issues with the motherboard. this of course entailed removing the processor and placing it onto the new motherboard. i could have watched the tech do all this, but c’mon, i’m a busy man.

well, anyone who’s been reading my blog knows about the cpu throttling issues i’ve been having under linux 2.6. turns out, it wasn’t linux. i decided to watch what was happening when the cpu was throttling to T6 (which is about 87 percent throttled!) and the temperature on the cpu was WAAAY above the norm. so i did what any other self-respecting geek would do and took it apart. much to my dismay, this is what i found…

this is the heatpipe assembly minus the cpu:

this is the top view of the cpu:

The side of the cpu:

so, i cleaned everything up, redid the greasejob properly with AS5 (i don’t wanna hear “product x is better than as5″…i don’t care, i like AS5) and the laptop now doesn’t throttle all the time like it did before, but actually runs faster in windows and has more consistent performance.

thanks, dell. i really appreciate the hassle you’ve caused me with your shitty repair work.

Given I’m a software engineer, I found this rather funny…

 (you can click the image to make it bigger)

ok, the old theme was pissing me off, so this theme will be here until i get the new theme written and built. if ya don’t like it, uh, deal.

got 2 major things done:

1. fixed the last 5 “hotlist” on the main page
2. put the site news section back on the main page

Everyone cheer, dammit!

i changed the blogging software…b2evolution was pissing me off, royally. ok, i outgrew the simplicity it provided.

anyway, we’re using wordpress now, and i’ll keep the old blog around for awhile, it’s linked on the right. all that’s left to do now is to port my skin to wordpress’ skin format, and i’m all set. i dunno if i wanna bother importing my old blog’s posts…it doesn’t really make much sense in my mind right now, so it will probably never get done. but, yea…w00t, na?

in the meantime, tell me what you think!

code...neat