Monday, November 28, 2011

New PC Components

New Stuff:
Motherboard: ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K
SGD 583
RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 4GB X 2
SGD 85
Primary Disk: ADATA S511 120GB
SGD 290

Monday, June 13, 2011

Consequences of Treating My Car as Amphibious

I have to admit - driving my car through floods in Bukit Timah Road is thrilling and fun... but the consequence is dire :P (Well, it could be much worse, if the water went into the engine.)

Just recording down the damage for reference later based on my interpretation of the repair bill.

1) The ETM (Electronic Throttle Module) obviously has to be cleaned because water got into it. Luckily, labor cost only - SGD 169. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zaxtm-hdyo)

2) MAF (Mass Air Flow) Sensor has to be replaced. This one damn expensive - SGD 728 for parts and 65 for labor.

3) Air Filter has to be replaced because water got in. Cheap.

4) Spark Plug has to be replaced too. about 200 parts + labor.

5) Intercooler is ok, but need to be removed and reinstalled to replace other parts I think. SGD 327.

Good thing is, the clutch-in seems more smooth after the repair... Anyway, next time, detour whenever seeing flood :)

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

How I fixed my MSI P35 Neo2 FR's problem

I am using a 3 year old MSI P35 Neo2 FR (MSI 7345) motherboard with 4 sticks of 1GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800 RAM. The 7345 started to have problem when all 4 sticks are inserted - I can't remember since when the problem started to surface.

Symptoms include - system hang at "Initializing USB Controller..." during boot-up; IO error after boot loader phase; hanging at Windows start up screen (or during Linux boot-up, showing some ata device IO errors); RAM error during boot-up check (as shown by on-board diagnostic LEDs); disk IO errors after booting into Windows, etc.

The problems seem unpredicatable, and I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting these problems. I went for RMA and replaced my motherboard eventually, but the problems still persist.

In the end, I discovered that once I turn off the Quick Booting option in BIOS, the problems seem gone. Still need to monitor for a bit longer to make sure it is indeed the solution.

And, I shall never buy another MSI board for my next PC.