Tim: >> Yes, an update can be more stressful than other PC activities, for >> *some* users. But for other users, they're always subjecting their >> PC to a heavy workload, so a prolonged update session is nothing >> different from normal use. William Mattison: > I don't understand what you're saying here. Both weekly patches went > very quickly (I wish windows-7 were like that!) and with no errors > reported in the output. You mentioned that the problems happened straight after doing a dnf update, and wondered if *that* process could have been the cause of the problems. I was pointing out that an update is no different than any other medium-duty processing the computer might do (a bit of heavy thinking when it processes dependencies, idling along as new files get downloaded, a bit of slighly heavy thinking as the packages are decompressed for a few moments before they get saved to disc). >> But what type of power supply did you put in? Did you... > I did not figure out that part for myself. I got advice from a friend > with decades of experience working for IBM's high performance > division, and then for Cray research. The power supply is a > Thermaltake TR2 600W. The system also has a Core i7-3770K @ 3.5GHz x > 8, 16 GB memory, GeForce GTX 660 graphics card, an ASUS Xonar Essence > STX audio card, a 2 TB hard drive, 2 blu-ray drives, keyboard, > trackball, web cam (rarely plugged in), two 27-inch Dell monitors, and > 2 small speakers. It's no gaming system, but a rather high-powered > programming workstation by 2013 standards. I would have thought 600 watts is more than sufficient for a general PC. If you look at what gamers do to their boxes (with their high end graphics cards and virtually a CPU farm in a box), it's staggering the amount of power that some PCs (allegedly) use. I'm sure they don't really use all that, but the short term peaks as things fire up, change modes, etc., can be a heck of a lot higher than their nominal power usage - those transients can trip up cheap and nasty supplies. Thermaltake TR2 600W specs Maximum output capability 600 watts (no surprise, considering the model name, and I think they've got a good reputation). ASUS Sabertooth Z77 Looks nice, but I see no power specs on their site. Though I see a review of that board with your processor that suggests up to 183 watts normally, add another 100 watts if overclocked. GeForce GTX 660 specs Maximum power used by the card 140 watts Minimum system power supply recommendation 450 watts Hmm, yeah, love their thinking there. Well, I supposed they're making an estimation of the likely power requirement of the rest of your system. ASUS Xonar Essence STX Looks nice, a card without those wonky 3.5 mm jacks, and designed for sound quality. The kind of thing I might have gone for if I were buying new parts. No power specs, but I wouldn't think it's a major power hog. Hard drives under 10 watts Blu-ray drives about 30 watts Yes, sounds like a 600 watt supply should be fine. And your friend obviously has the background to figure that out, too. So, if it's a power problem, that might be down to a fault rather than being an insufficient supply, in general. Noting your other messages about hard drive errors, it may be that the drive itself is failing. Unrecoverable errors doesn't sound good, and have never bode well for the couple of drives I had with them. Though some people say that they can carry on using a drive with such bad sectors, if there's not many of them, and they're not increasing. Faults with "unrecoverable, uncorrectable, unreadable" types of errors are a big red flag. The simple test is to try and write to the entire drive (which is easiest to do when wiping the entire contents, rather than filling up the space of an in-use drive), and see if that changes the error condition. Such as, if it couldn't read the contents of something that was an interrupted write (such as a system crash, power failure, etc), on an undamaged portion of the drive, but could wipe and re-use that bit, suggests the drive will be okay. The error being caused externally. But if it can't write and read those sectors, with a fresh attempt, that points the finger at the drive being at fault. There are long and short SMART self tests that do these kinds of things. If you can afford to wipe the drive and test it, that may be the best way forward. If you go to your drive's manufacturer's site, they probably have a self-booting disc image to burn to test your drive (Seagate and Western Digital, at least, used to when I've done this in the dim and distant past). If you can't do that, my suggestion is to buy a new hard drive, install a fresh OS onto it, and test drive your PC for a week or so. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 (always current details of the computer that I'm writing this email on) Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages posted to the mailing list. The mindset of software designers: You know that feature that you, and many thousands of other users, found useful? We removed it, because we didn't like it. We also hard-coded the default settings that you keep customising. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
